VMware today gave up on its own infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering, VMware vCloud Air. It is selling the service to OVH, the European hosting juggernaut. That signals a major shift as it signals VMware strategically is going to continue chasing its customers leaving for AWS, Azure, Google, and IBM clouds. OVH now operates 20 data centers and has the scale to do things such as manufacture its own servers. It has the infrastructure available to provide low-cost dedicated servers, public cloud services and now migrate existing VMware vCloud Air customers. This makes sense as vCloud Air has historically had margins closer to VMware’s software business rather than a typical cloud hosting business.
Excerpt From the VMware vCloud Air OVH AcquisitionPress Release
You can read more about the transaction on the official press release. We have an excerpt here and a link to the full release at the bottom:
VMware, a global leader in cloud infrastructure and business mobility, and OVH, a global hyper-scale cloud provider, today announced OVH intends to acquire the VMware vCloud Air business. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. The transaction is expected to close in calendar Q2 2017.
vCloud Air is VMware’s cloud offering based on the software-driven data center and is designed specifically to meet enterprise needs delivering a secure, hybrid cloud experience. The recent introduction of bi-directional, zero downtime cloud migration and the hybrid DMZ architecture has enabled customers to accelerate the pace of migration to the cloud, while maintaining security, compliance and control. Since its inception, vCloud Air has serviced industry leading customers as they embrace a hybrid cloud environment.
In conjunction with this announcement, VMware is reiterating its previously issued financial guidance for Q1 and the full fiscal year 2018.
VMware has evolved its business strategy to focus on providing hybrid and cross-cloud software and services. Given this evolution, VMware is transitioning vCloud Air U.S. and European data centers, customer operations, and customer success teams to OVH. After the close of the acquisition, OVH will operate the service as vCloud Air Powered by OVH, will continue to leverage VMware’s hybrid cloud technology, and will closely partner with VMware on go-to-market and customer support around the three proven vCloud Air use cases: data center extension, data center consolidation, and data center recovery.
“We are pleased to announce this next step in vCloud Air’s evolution. We have enjoyed a long and successful partnership with OVH and view this acquisition as an extension of our partnership and a positive for our customers and partners. Customers will have access to OVH’s global footprint, high-touch customer support, and still retain the VMware SDDC technology innovation that they are accustomed to,” said Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer, VMware. “We remain committed to delivering our broader Cross-Cloud Architecture that extends our hybrid cloud strategy, enabling customers to run, manage, connect, and secure their applications across clouds and devices in a common operating environment.”
OVH is one of the largest cloud service providers in the world with more than one million customers and 260,000 servers deployed. A long-time VMware vCloud Air Network partner with more than 200,000 VMs from thousands of customers running VMware vSphere Private Cloud, OVH was recognized as “Service Provider of the Year” by VMware 2011-2014 and in 2016. Both companies collaborated to bring Software-defined Data Center (SDDC) as a Service to market in 2016. vCloud Air customers will benefit from greater choice as they select from OVH’s global data centers across four continents and experience faster performance and workload mobility through the company’s thousands of miles of dark fiber and 32 points of presence worldwide.
(Source: VMware)
