A new partnership between IBM and VMware was announced in Las Vegas at IBM’s annual InterConnect cloud and mobile technology conference. This partnership will present the IBM cloud as the showcase platform in the VMware vCloud Air Network ecosystem. This is one specific area in the cloud space where VMware has the ability to really shine. IBM and VMware will present advanced automation with workflows available to provision new or to scale existing workloads into the IBM cloud, utilizing the VMware tools and APIs that most Fortune 100 companies are all too familiar with. They will present this service in a simple pay-as-you-go type consumption model.
I foresee that deployment options for IBM’s cloud could very easily be presented in VMware’s vCenter Server as well as VMware’s vRealize Automation cloud automation solution. This leaves VMware with several different methods for deploying and scaling resources or workloads as well as the management of private and public cloud resources.
Amazon AWS’s Achilles’ heel is Amazon’s current inability to play well with others; it is really easy to get onto Amazon, but getting your data back is a whole other story. The hybrid cloud market is, in my opinion, the next area that appears to be ready to really take off. The hybrid cloud market is estimated to grow from a $25.28 billion market in 2014 to almost $85 billion market by 2019. This presents a compound annual growth rate of 27.3% in that five-year period.
There is one specific VMware technology that is really going to play a large part in the success VMware will have as the broker in the hybrid cloud market. It is VMware NSX that will help in the presentation of seamless workload migration, once you add capabilities of other products in the vRealize or vCloud suites to add in disaster recovery and the ability for burst scalability and data center consolidation.
I believe that IBM might be just the first of a number of “showcase solutions” that presented in the vCloud Air Network ecosystem, and other companies will follow. The capabilities that VMware’s time-tested technology has will just further cement VMware’s place as the king of the hybrid clouds. If the projections turn out to be accurate, then this is very good news for VMware moving forward.
IBM has a couple of other announcements besides the partnership with VMware. IBM has announced its expansion into the Apple world and the Swift Sandbox that now over 100,000 developers use to develop for Apple’s applications. Since Apple open-sourced Apple’s programming language, Swift, and now together with IBM’s larger enterprise play with Apple, IBM has announced the preview of Swift runtime and a Swift Package Catalog creator. These reflect IBM’s attempt to break down the barriers between the front-end and back-end application development, which can standardize on a single language to a better user experience while establishing better and more efficient back-end logic.
But wait, there is more. IBM is doubling down on its investment in the development space by announcing a new GitHub partnership in which IBM will offer a dedicated GitHub Enterprise experience via its own Bluemix cloud platform which helped IBM to expand software collaborative coding and to top it off Bitly has announced that it would be migrating over 25 billion shortcut links, which are create via Bitly’s link shortening service over to IBM’s cloud.
IBM appears to really be focusing a lot of effort and resources on further cloud development and hybrid cloud solutions by announcing a new set of services that IBM is calling its Cloud Connectors, which will allow more development on connectors and solutions to link up more easily to the services in the cloud. Some of these solutions include things like WebSphere Connect, API Connect, MQ Connect, DataWorks, z/OS Connect Enterprise Edition, and WebSphere Blockchain Connect, while at the same time adding an additional three new API’s into the Watson artificial intelligence (AI) system to expand the existing Text to Speech API with emotion and re-releasing it as “Expressive TTS.” This development gives an indication of IBM’s continued interest in robotic technology, and it looks to add more empathy and emotion to machines in the quest to make robots more humanlike.
It is nice to see IBM continue to invest in the cloud and I believe the VMware partnership will be good for both VMware and IBM and it looks like IBM is getting back to the basics with the investments into development.