VMWare Now Includes Google Public Cloud in Catalog
VMWare and Google have solidified a deal may bolster the appeal of VMWare’s vCloud Air service. Reports suggest the vCloud Air platform will work hand-in-hand with the Google platform. This means that VMWare customers will be able to integrate Google features such as object storage, BigQuery, Cloud Datastore and much more. Google and VMWare mention that the services will be fully integrated by the middle of the year.
Brandon Butler of NetworkWorld writes, “VMware has the least mature public cloud offering among its competitors.” Given this fact, it seems natural that VMWare would look for ways to differentiate and provide more features. The partnership with Google also helps VMWare compete against more established IaaS providers such as AWS and Azure.
VMWare CEO Pat Gelsinger described the deal as a “win-win.” Gelsinger mentions, “What they have so well complements what we have; Bringing those together in the vCloud service brings our customers services that allow them to significantly extend workloads into the cloud.”
VMWare will likely let this change marinate among its users to see their response. If the response is positive, VMWare has mentioned that they would be interested in including additional services being offered by Google in its public cloud. Rumors surrounding the deal suggest that one of VMWare’s software offerings could be used to create and manage Google cloud workloads in the future.
Keep in mind that the announcement doesn’t mean that Google’s full palate of cloud services will be fully offered by VMWare. For example, VMWare customers will be unable to spin up Google Compute Engine cloud instances. If they wanted that functionality, they would likely need to login to Google to get that started.
It’s being reported that VMWare and Google are currently implementing private connections that link their datacenters together. One of the biggest fears for VMWare is that customers will see Google’s offerings in the vCloud catalog, cut VMWare out of the equation and go to Google directly. James Staten from Forrester research mentions, “This is going to make it very easy to try out Google services.”
