VMware made a slew of cloud-related announcements at the start of its VMWorld conference this week, but perhaps the most notable one concerned a set of services that are still under development.
VMWware's Cross-Cloud Services are now in preview. Here's the description from VMWare's announcement:
Cross-Cloud Services are new Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings under development to enable visibility into cloud usage and costs, enhance consistent networking and security policies, and automate the deployment, management, and migration of applications and data across vSphere and non-vSphere private and public clouds. ... The Cross-Cloud Services VMware will preview at VMworld include:
Discovery and Analytics: enabling discovery, onboarding, and governance of public cloud applications;
Compliance and Security: using micro-segmentation and monitoring to provide security and compliance for applications across clouds;
Deployment and Migration: providing developers the ability to work cross-cloud, and IT the ability to manage cross-cloud applications with security and compliance.
VMware also announced Cloud Foundation, a bundle of virtualization, networking, storage and management software for building private clouds. It will be available as a service on public clouds as well, initially on IBM's with others to follow.
The Bottom Line
VMWare also announced new innovations for its VCloud public cloud offering, saying it remained a "critical part" of its hybrid cloud strategy. But realistically, the company no longer has major designs on directly competing with Amazon Web Services, IBM and Microsoft on cloud infrastructure workloads and will focus on presenting itself as the ideal management layer for companies working with multiple clouds.
The outcome is a mixed bag for VMWare, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller.
"Cross-cloud is what CIOs want," Mueller says. "But what this means really is the end of the road for any VMware public cloud IaaS ambitions and revenue. Now it's all back to the partners, and VMware will only get direction and orchestration revenues, which is not nothing, but less than one would have expected two or three years ago."
Moreover, many other vendors have provided multi-cloud management tools for years, and VMWare's Cross-Cloud Services don't even have a firm release date. Still, while VMWare's cloud pivot may be late in coming, its brand value among enterprise IT shops remains extremely high.
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