VMware AWS Partnership Proves It Has Learned From Its Mistakes

Mistakes were made. But the VMware AWS partnership shows that the virtualization giant has learned from its past mistakes, as it works towards its hybrid cloud aspirations, devising a long-term strategy.

Details of this new strategic alliance between both companies are still scarce.

VMware executives have slowly been spilling the beans, however.

What we do know is that VMware on AWS is still in closed beta, and is likely to become generally available at VMworld. We also know that the infrastructure that hosts it consists of EXSi hypervisors running on bare metal hardware.

This essentially provides a simplified onramp for a potential VMware hybrid cloud configuration, and this is something that has the potential to bring more revenue for the company.

Ultimately, VMware wants to deliver, what it calls, the best of both worlds to the customers.

That’s because VMware on AWS is still a VMware product, a VMware cloud — the company will provide support and customers will pay it the bill, who will then pay Amazon Web Services. Neither company has disclosed the breakdown of the revenue or cost, though.

But what’s equally interesting is what is happening beyond VMware on AWS.

The virtualization firm is also currently working with a number of cloud providers, some 4,000 independent software vendors. Many of these ISVs provide the same basic services as AWS, but offer unique services that appeal to businesses.

Things like data locality and conforming to specific government regulations.

At the same time, VMware has also teamed up with larger names like IBM and Microsoft.

But VMware is not the only one that stands to gain from its partnership with Amazon Web Service. The cloud provider can now cross sell applications services like Database and Lambda to on premise VMware customers.

And this is something that has the potential to lead to a serious uptick in Amazon revenue.

VMware, in taking AWS and making it its own, has made a calculated decision in response to the failure of the company’s original cloud offering. It has acknowledged its errors in the past, and could now well be the glue that holds all clouds together, making transparent intracloud migrations a reality.