IBM and VMware expand their technology partnership
IBM Corp. and VMware Inc. are expanding their long-running partnership to better support customers’ information technology modernization initiatives.
The companies announced the move today at the VMware Explore 2022 conference in San Francisco. The expanded alliance places a particular emphasis on public sector organizations, as well as private sector companies in regulated industries such as healthcare and finance.
As part of the expanded alliance, VMware has named IBM’s IBM Consulting division a Global Systems Integrator partner. IBM Consulting will provide services intended to help organizations modernize their workloads and move them to newer technology infrastructure. Additionally, the division will assist organizations with the day-to-day maintenance work involved in running applications.
“This ongoing collaboration will enable us to better streamline the user experience for our mutual enterprise customers looking to run VMware mission critical workloads that require higher levels of security, resiliency and compliance support in financial services and regulated industries,” said Mark Lohmeyer, the senior vice president and general manager of VMware’s cloud infrastructure business.
Another focus of the expanded partnership is the VMware and IBM Joint Innovation Lab. Originally launched in 2018, the lab is a hub where employees from the two companies collaborate on joint engineering initiatives. IBM and VMware will provide additional funding for the hub that will enable it to continue developing new offerings.
The company companies today that the VMware and IBM Joint Innovation Lab has completed 20 hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence projects since its launch. As part of its work, the lab has produced multiple reference architectures, blueprints that make it easier to use IBM and VMware products in the same technology environment.
Last year, IBM expanded its product portfolio with a platform called IBM Cloud Satellite. The platform enables customers to deploy key services from the company’s public cloud in their on-premises data centers. IBM today stated that it will equip IBM Cloud Satellite with improved support for on-premises workloads that run on VMware software.
“Together, IBM and VMware are supporting our mutual clients in regulated industries by offering something no two other companies are delivering– to more easily leverage hybrid cloud services securely — wherever and however they wish to run them,” said Howard Boville, the senior vice president of the IBM Cloud Platform.
Last year, IBM spun off its managed infrastructure services division into an independent company called Kyndryl Holdings Inc. that is now traded on the NYSE. A few weeks after the spinoff, VMware announced a new collaboration with Kyndryl focused on the virtualization provider’s Tanzu suite of multicloud products. As part of the collaboration, Kyndryl will provide advisory, implementation and IT management services to help companies run Tanzu in their technology environments.
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