VMware and AWS Announce Initial Availability of VMware Cloud on AWS


LAS VEGAS, NV--(Marketwired - August 28, 2017) - VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW)

  • Strategic Alliance Between Private and Public Cloud Leaders Delivers a Seamlessly Integrated Hybrid Cloud
  • Early Access and Beta Customers include Brink's, Cerner, Elemica, MIT, Moody's, State of Louisiana, and Sysco

Today at VMworld® 2017, VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), and Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the initial availability of VMware Cloudon AWS. Born out of the strategic alliance announced in October 2016, VMware Cloud on AWS brings VMware's software-defined data center (SDDC) to the AWS Cloud, allowing customers to run applications across operationally consistent VMware vSphere®-based private, public, and hybrid cloud environments, with optimized access to AWS services. VMware Cloud on AWS is delivered, sold, and supported by VMware as an on-demand, elastically-scalable cloud service that removes barriers to cloud migration and cloud portability, increases IT efficiency, and opens up new opportunities for customers to leverage a hybrid cloud environment. To get started with VMware Cloud on AWS, visit http://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws.

Customers across industries are accelerating adoption of AWS Cloud and VMware infrastructure, and many of them want the ability to seamlessly integrate their on-premises data center environments with AWS using their existing tools and skillsets within a common operating environment based on familiar VMware software. VMware Cloud on AWS delivers on this promise, with a seamlessly integrated hybrid cloud that extends on-premises vSphere environments to a VMware SDDC running on AWS elastic, bare-metal infrastructure.

"VMware and AWS are empowering enterprise IT and operations teams to add value to their businesses through the combination of VMware enterprise capabilities and the breadth and depth of capabilities and scale of the AWS Cloud, providing them a platform for any application," said Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer, VMware. "VMware Cloud on AWS gives customers a seamlessly integrated hybrid cloud that delivers the same architecture, capabilities, and operational experience across both their vSphere-based on-premises environment and AWS."

"With the availability of VMware Cloud on AWS, for the first time customers can operate a consistent and seamless hybrid IT environment that combines the VMware software they love with the unmatched functionality, security, and operational expertise of the AWS Cloud," said Andy Jassy, chief executive officer, AWS. "The majority of the world's enterprises have virtualized their data centers with VMware, and now these customers can easily move applications between their on-premises environments and AWS without having to purchase any new hardware, rewrite their applications, or modify their operations."

VMware Cloud on AWS is powered by VMware Cloud Foundation™, the unified SDDC platform that integrates vSphere, VMware VSAN™, and VMware NSX® virtualization technologies with VMware vCenter® management. This means customers can use familiar VMware tools to manage their applications, without having to purchase any new or custom hardware, rewrite applications, or modify their operating model. With VMware Cloud on AWS, customers can leverage AWS's breadth of services, including compute, databases, analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), security, mobile, deployment, application services, and more.

VMware Cloud on AWS delivers:

  • Enterprise capabilities of VMware SDDC with the agility, unmatched functionality, and operational expertise of AWS's leading public cloud
  • Identical skills, tools, and processes for managing private and public cloud environments so customers have consistent operations, improved productivity, and reduced costs
  • Seamless, fast, and bi-directional workload portability between private and public clouds
  • Flexibility to choose where to run applications based on business needs, while having access to a broad set of AWS services and infrastructure elasticity for VMware SDDC environments
  • Rapid time to value with the ability to scale host capacity up or down in a few minutes, and spin up an entire VMware SDDC in under a couple hours
  • Ability to run, manage, and secure applications in a hybrid IT environment without having to purchase custom hardware, rewrite applications, or modify operating models

VMware Cloud on AWS is ideal for customers looking to migrate applications to the public cloud, develop entirely new applications, extend the capacity of their data centers for existing applications, or quickly provision development and test environments. It will also support containerized workloads and DevOps services such as Pivotal Cloud Foundry, and others. VMware and AWS plan to continue to innovate together to add new capabilities and additional AWS regions to support customers that want to use VMware Cloud on AWS for disaster recovery, data center consolidation, and geographic expansion.

The service is initially available in the AWS US West (Oregon) region and will expand to AWS regions worldwide in 2018. Today customers can consume this service hourly and pay only for each hour that a host is active in their account. Pricing and requirements can be found at http://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws/pricing. VMware will make one-year and three-year subscription options available in the future. VMware's Hybrid Loyalty Program will provide discounts to customers with on-premises VMware vSphere, NSX, and/or vSAN licenses. The pricing model, combined with the VMware Hybrid Loyalty Program discounts, will offer very attractive TCO benefits on a per-VM basis to both VMware and AWS customers.

Broad Technology Partner Ecosystem Supports Frictionless Hybrid Cloud Experience
The VMware Cloud on AWS technology partner ecosystem provides customers simplicity, consistency, and choice in technology solutions when building a hybrid cloud. Today, more than 30 solutions are available for DevOps, application migration, data protection, cloud analytics, security, and more. The same third-party solutions VMware customers use on-premises; the tools, configurations, and processes that customers built for these solutions; and the operational skills and competencies developed over time, now seamlessly transfer to VMware Cloud on AWS. VMware technology complement and enhance native VMware Cloud on AWS services capabilities. Read more about the VMware partner ecosystem in this blog.

VMware Solutions Simplify and Automate VMware Cloud on AWS Hybrid Cloud Environments
Customers can use VMware's management products with VMware Cloud on AWS, so they have a unified and operationally consistent experience across private, public, and hybrid clouds. Today, VMware vRealize® Automation™ supports VMware Cloud on AWS by automating workload provisioning and deployment; vRealize Operations™ delivers proactive performance management, capacity optimization, and unified visibility; and vRealize ® Business™ for Cloud tracks and manages costs, accelerates planning, and drives business alignment. Other VMware solutions, including VMware Site Recovery Manager™, VMware vSphere Integrated Containers, and VMware Cloud Services will follow in the future. Read more about the VMware Cloud on AWS integration with vRealize Suite in this blog.

Industry Commentary
Moody's is an essential component of the global capital markets, providing credit ratings, research, tools, and analysis that contribute to transparent and integrated financial markets. "Congratulations on the launch of the VMware Cloud on AWS offering, which has the potential to help enable public cloud adoption for companies that are significantly virtualized on the VMware platform. VMware Cloud on AWS offers many features that we've been waiting to use in our infrastructure, and provides a way to ease bi-directional portability, extend our use of VMware's SDDC capabilities and drive colocation with AWS core services and use AWS's native technologies from the VMware cloud on AWS with minimal latency. Additionally, the VMware Cloud on AWS provides us with a good landing spot for migrating workloads that are not yet cloud ready." - Rajiv Doshi, senior vice president of infrastructure services, Moody's

The State of Louisiana Office of Technology Services handles IT operations for 16 statewide agencies. "We partnered with VMware to create a hybrid cloud environment that will serve as a model for other states looking to consolidate and streamline IT operations while improving security. We'll be able to use VMware Cloud on AWS and leverage NSX to extend to the public cloud across a common operating environment. This gives us public cloud agility and economics with proven enterprise-class virtualized infrastructure." - Michael Allison, chief technology officer, Division of Administration/OTS, State of Louisiana

Dell EMC, a part of Dell Technologies, enables organizations to modernize, automate and transform their data center using industry-leading converged infrastructure, servers, storage, and data protection technologies. "The introduction of VMware Cloud on AWS further solidifies VMware's position as a driving force behind the movement to the software-defined data center and the hybrid cloud. Dell EMC is committed to making IT infrastructure seamless, and enabling our customers to modernize their data protection in VMware environments is a critical milestone on the journey to data center transformation. Being the first data protection provider to offer backup and recovery for VMware Cloud on AWS underscores our commitment to innovative solutions and further advances our deep integration with VMware." - David Goulden, President, Dell EMC

Accenture is a leading professional services company, providing a broad range of services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital, technology, and operations to 93 of the Fortune 100 and more than 70 percent of the Fortune 500. "VMware and AWS continue to be very strategic partners for Accenture on private and public cloud. Our strong relationships and deep expertise allow us to craft the optimal journey to cloud for our clients that optimizes their use of private/hybrid/public cloud and accelerates their ability to achieve positive business outcomes such as agility, innovation and ROI." - Jack Sepple, senior managing director, Cloud & Operations, Accenture CT

Capgemini is a global leader in consulting, technology, and outsourcing services. "The enterprise's Software-Defined Data Centers and the AWS Cloud ecosystem of technologies and products now have a defined future together. Our customers increasingly want portability for their workloads across private and public cloud environments, while using industry-leading platforms. The VMware Cloud on AWS offering, in combination with the VMware Cloud Foundation model, is well positioned to help companies achieve their hybrid cloud and workload migration goals for business-critical systems. We look forward to working with VMware and AWS to help customers who want to take business advantage of a cloud-first way of working." - Joe Coyle, executive vice president, global chief technology officer, Cloud Services, Capgemini

Deloitte provides industry-leading audit, consulting, tax and advisory services to many of the world's most admired brands, including 80 percent of the Fortune 500 and more than 6,000 private and middle market companies. "I'm very excited about the platform and what it could do for our clients who are working towards a hybrid cloud model. This is one of the first offerings of its kind-I believe significant benefits can be achieved for those willing to explore the incredible capabilities." - Bob Black, principal, Cloud Infrastructure and Engineering, hybrid cloud leader, Deloitte Consulting

DXC Technology is the world's leading independent, end-to-end IT services company. "DXC Technology and VMware have a strong history of teaming together to help clients with their digital transformation journeys. By combining VMware's Hybrid Cloud Services platform with DXC cloud services and industry expertise, we provide our clients the choice of both on-premises and cloud solutions on existing virtualized applications. This allows the business to make decisions based on cost, flexibility, and availability that transcend the constraints of legacy datacenter and app hosting decisions." - Stephen Hilton, executive vice president, Global Delivery, DXC Technology

Rackspace is a leading managed cloud company that helps businesses, including more than half of the Fortune 100, tap the power of cloud computing without the complexity and cost of managing it on their own. "VMware Cloud on AWS provides a unique advantage to customers seeking to leverage the benefits of a hybrid cloud environment. This technology shows VMware's commitment to helping customers embrace hybrid cloud by running VMware workloads out of the data center in the best-fit location. Rackspace is proud to be one of a select few design partners actively participating in defining enhancements to the VMware Cloud Provider Program, including VMware Cloud on AWS, and we look forward to extending our renowned Fanatical Support® to the service next year." - Peter FitzGibbon, vice president and general manager of VMware, Rackspace

About Amazon Web Services
For 11 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 90 fully featured services for compute, storage, networking, database, analytics, application services, deployment, management, developer, mobile, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), security, hybrid, and enterprise applications, from 44 Availability Zones (AZs) across 16 geographic regions in the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the UK. AWS services are trusted by millions of active customers around the world -- including the fastest growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies -- to power their infrastructure, make them more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit https://aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon
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About VMware Cloud
VMware Cloud™ gives customers maximum flexibility to select the best cloud environment to deploy and run applications on any device, with the ability to leverage development platforms and building blocks for new applications - while also maintaining consistent operations that help ensure the integrity of the entire IT portfolio. VMware Cloud provides the essential software foundation that delivers a common operating environment spanning on-premises data centers and leading public/managed clouds. VMware Cloud delivers the optimal environment for all applications: custom-built applications, packaged apps, virtualized, cloud-native and SaaS. VMware Cloud creates an ideal environment for building, testing and deploying production applications and is supported by a broad ecosystem of partners.

About VMware
VMware, a global leader in cloud infrastructure and business mobility, helps customers realize possibilities by accelerating their digital transformation journeys. With VMware solutions, organizations are improving business agility by modernizing data centers and integrating public clouds, driving innovation with modern apps, creating exceptional experiences by empowering the digital workspace, and safeguarding customer trust by transforming security. With 2016 revenue of $7.09 billion, VMware is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA and has over 500,000 customers and 75,000 partners worldwide.

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