There may soon be more news on Amazon and VMware’s nine-month-old partnership. Last October, Amazon and VMware— which had been rivals in public cloud computing—inked a surprise alliance.
Together, they said they would ensure that key VMware data center technology would run on Amazon Web Services data centers. The fruit of that deal, a product called VMware Cloud on AWS, was promised for delivery in the middle of 2017.
This still has not happened, although a VMware spokesman said the product remains on track for mid year. When Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell, speaking at Coins2Day Brainstorm Tech on Monday, hinted at more news on this front next month at an annual VMware even, some industry followers assumed he meant that VMware (VMW), partly owned by Dell Technologies, would announce the product’s actual launch at that time. And that may well be the case.
But there may be another shoe dropping. On Monday, tech news site The Information reported that the two companies may announce an extension to the Amazon-VMware partnership. AWS did not comment for that report. VMware vice president Mark Lohmeyer noted generally that there will be more opportunities for the two companies to work together. The VMware spokesman had no comment on that story. Coins2Day also contacted Amazon for comment and will update this story as needed.
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VMware Cloud for AWS was seen by many as a way for Amazon to move corporate data and applications out of customers’ internal data centers into AWS. However, the Information, citing several unnamed former VMware employees, said phase two of the alliance would be more about helping companies keep some workloads running internally while also tapping into Amazon (AMZN) resources as needed.
The goal of this expanded partnership would theoretically make it easier for customers to maintain their own private clouds, which they control, for some applications, but to be able to combine private and public cloud resources for fast disaster recovery.
A few years ago, VMware launched a product called vCloud Air to compete directly with AWS, but ended up selling it to OVH a large European computer hosting provider in April.