A suite of applications on the Marriott website and its mobile app are now hosted on the IBM Cloud.... [+]
As some of the world's biggest tech companies look to cloud computing as their next major source of growth, IBM and VMware are strengthening their alliance to work with customers who are adopting a "hybrid" approach.
The two companies went onstage together at VMware's annual conference on Monday to demonstrate that their partnership, first announced in February, has had real results. More than 500 companies are now running VMware virtual machines on the IBM Cloud, headlined by Marriott International, the companies said. IBM now has nearly 4,000 service sellers, or cloud consultants, trained up on VMware so far. And a VMware Cloud Foundation compatibility with IBM promises to make it even faster to deploy from VMware's product in an on-premise environment to IBM's cloud.
Offering dedicated consulting services alongside joint sales and making integrating the platform faster should help the world's larger companies make the plunge to the cloud, the two companies hope. "Many of our customers in the cloud are our key enterprise customers, and VMware is very penetrated in the enterprise," says IBM vice president Don Boulia. "So if they haven't moved to the cloud, they already understand that toolset."
As Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google increasingly battle for to host companies on their cloud computing platforms, offering more and more advanced tools for them to analyze and study their data, IBM has sought to carve out its own position as the big business-friendly alternative that can do the heavy lifting for a large corporation looking to move some, but not all, of its data and applications to the cloud. For VMware, working with IBM helps the company's virtual machines stay relevant and in use whether a customer's deploying them on their own server's or IBM's.
That story's working so far at their mutual customer Marriott. A longtime user of IBM's services and VMware's technology, Marriott started experimenting with combining the two after VMware appeared at IBM's cloud event in February to announce the partnership.
Marriott has a team of about 30 engineers focused exclusively on cloud technology today, such as building and hosting the applications for guests at its 4,500 properties, and made the decision to develop all its new mobile and dotcom tech in the public cloud. Before that partnership, Marriott could set up workloads in VMware virtual machines in a couple hours, says senior vice president Alan Rosa, while integrating with IBM in half a day. Using one piece of automation to bridge the two, Marriott's engineers can get projects up and running on the cloud within an hour, Rosa says, saving money and employee time.
IBM and VMware's hybrid story appeals to Marriott in part because of the company's transition to a mostly cloud, but never fully cloud, structure, the company says. Rosa believes Marriott's computing architecture will move from more of a 50-50 split to about 70% cloud in the next several years, and eventually five years from now or more be closer to 80%. "That's where I think it'll remain," he says, for a mixture of security and performance concerns. Ideally, customers and developers won't even need to know, much less care, whether their apps are running from on-premise virtual machines or over the cloud, the Marriott IT executive explains. An automated policy could simply decide which makes the most sense for a project. "Either option should be just as resilient, just as available."
At Marriott, IBM's efforts to adapt and change to provide a compelling cloud suite are appreciated. Other companies who've tried the partnership out so far include Clarient, Finnair, Etihad Airways and Monitise, a drop in the bucket compared to the logos that both VMware and IBM claim to work with separately.
The affirmation of their partnership at VMware's annual conference on Monday gives IBM and VMware sources of new business and some welcome positive momentum to share. They'll have to continue to prove that name-brand customers are, like Marriott, doing more than just sticking their toes in the water of the new solution.
