Will The VMware AWS Partnership Backfire?

It’s a trap! VMware and AWS have never been closer, with both companies terming their recent blockbuster partnership as a win-win for all parties, none more so than enterprise customers.

Companies that are looking to migrate their virtualized workloads to the cloud.

But the more you look at it, the more it becomes evident that this new deal is more of a win for Amazon Web Services. For the cloud giant, this is a case of the rich getting richer — it gets all of the public cloud business it was getting anyway, while also getting the VMware business as it moves to the cloud.

And that’s without even bringing into the mix the fact that Amazon has a history of competing with its best partners.

There is a wave of optimism surrounding the virtualization titan and its partnership with AWS. A partnership that many believe is meant to save the software maker from oblivion as its customers continue to shift their systems to the cloud.

It is this optimism that has led to the VMware stock gaining almost 50% since last October.

And not just that, both companies are also said to be planning to go beyond the cloud, with the cloud leader actually developing software in collaboration with the virtualization leader that should be here towards the end of this year, or the start of 2018.

But here in lines the problem.

There is nothing keeping Amazon from developing its own competing set of products down the road. Software and services that mirror, or even improve upon, the functionality of VMware products. Should that happen then VMware would be poised to lose customers.

Including many that it helps introduce to Amazon Web Services through this partnership.

Nevertheless, even with its cloud leadership, it will take Amazon time to develop mature products that serve as viable alternates to what VMware offer.

To that end, it will be very interesting to see how this partnership evolves over the next three to five years, a timespan that some say is an eternity in the world of high technology. It certainly appears that this is a symbiotic deal, and will stay that way in the beginning, at least.

But VMware executives are not worried.

CEO Pat Gelsinger says that he is absolutely not worried about this, pointing to the fact that if customers just wanted to move to the Amazon service they would have, as AWS has been around for over a decade.

Nevertheless, as the past has shown, Amazon does not shy away from competing with longtime partners. It was just last year that it started selling its own services that helped customers move to the cloud and manage their systems.

Which brought it in direct competition with AWS partners like Accenture and 2nd Watch.

If something like this happens in the virtualization space, then there are no guarantees.

All bets are off!