VMware to offer its Horizon Air portfolio through IBM Cloud

The partnership will help VMware to tap the global scale and reach of IBM, whereas third-parties on IBM Cloud platform means strong footprint for IBM to compete against the likes of Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s AWS.

In order to get best of IBM global scale and reach, and compete with the likes of Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s AWS, technology giant IBM and a big player in virtualization technology – VMware, have come together to offer VMware’s Horizon Air cloud-hosted desktops and apps globally via the IBM Cloud.

After announcement of this partnership, the potential and mutual customers of both the tech firms will be able to deploy VMware’s Horizon Air cloud-hosted desktops and apps globally via the IBM Cloud for accessing apps and data from any device, anywhere, at any time.

Both the companies did not disclose the financial terms of the partnership. VMware Horizon Air on IBM Cloud is expected to be available in Q3 2016.

Earlier, in February of this year, both the companies have announced their strategic partnership to extend existing workloads of enterprises from on-premises software-defined data center to the cloud.

VMware Horizon Air offers virtual desktops and apps in VMware’s vCloud rather than the organisation’s data center, by taking care of entire back-end infrastructure, including hardware, software and service-level agreements, as well performance.

According to the statements, the two companies would market and sell services together.

Services such as pre-configured VMware SDDC environments for VMware vSphere, NSX and Virtual SAN — along with new hybrid cloud services developed by IBM (workload migrations, disaster recovery, capacity expansion and data center consolidation) could all be configured to run on IBM’s 45 Cloud Data Centers globally.

“VMware customers can easily move any workload from their on-premises servers to the IBM Cloud as if they were part of a local area network,”  Jim Comfort, chief technology officer, IBM Cloud, said in a blog post.

IBM Cloud is a collection of enterprise-class technologies and services for assessing the cloud readiness, for developing the adoption strategies and identify business entry points for a cloud environment. Its strategy is based on a hybrid cloud model that integrates the private cloud services of a company with the public cloud.

The tech-giant has seen decent momentum for its hybrid cloud offering and with the partnership with third parties like VMware it is expecting more surge. “We are seeing very positive customer interest and momentum with hybrid cloud offering,” Robert LeBlanc, senior vice president, IBM Cloud, said in a video post.

Interestingly, Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s AWS are also making headway in the area of partnering with third-party enterprise software providers, including those that compete with the likes of VMware and SugarCRM, the other partner of IBM.