VMware is slated to disclose its plans for hybrid cloud computing to its customers Tuesday. This announcement is needed, not because customers demand it, but because VMware needs to do something to arrest Amazon’s continued reach inside corporate IT.
As VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger explained to partners Feb. 27 in Las Vegas: “We all lose if [enterprise customers] end up in these commodity public clouds. We want to extend our franchise from the private cloud into the public cloud … Own the corporate workload now and forever.”
Maybe the event will even get underway with COO Carl Eschenbach repeating the exhortation he made to partners Feb. 27. Don’t get beaten by a competitor “that sells books.” He misspoke, of course. What he meant to say was don’t get beaten by “a mere bookseller.”
It’s already known that VMware will say the hybrid cloud will include its own version of infrastructure-as-a-service, a public cloud that customers may turn to if they want to migrate into a large-scale version of what they’ve already got on premises. As a plus, their existing management tools will see workloads in either place, giving them an extension to their data centers.
That interpretation comes from Forrester Research analyst James Staten, who on March 13 posted a blog reporting what he heard from VMware executives as they told investors what they intended to do next: “Yep, a full public IaaS cloud meant to compete with Amazon Web Services, IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, HP Cloud, Rackspace and others.”