VMware Inc. To Help Customers Use AWS and Other Public Clouds. Although VMware Inc. offers its own vCloud Air public clouds platform, VMware Inc. is creating a new service to assist customers using public cloud services such as Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), and platforms from Microsoft or IBM. VMware today announced a technology preview for Cross-Cloud Services, which was presented at the VMworld 2016 conference in Las Vegas. This “showcases how customers can manage and govern applications running in private or public clouds, including AWS Azure, IBM Cloud, and Azure.” Some industry pundits referred to this as VMware abandoning the public cloud space and ceding market share to the undisputed leaders. This is in contrast to continuing to invest in vCloud Air which is described as a secure public cloud platform that offers compute, storage and networking, as well as disaster recovery. VMware released a statement today saying that Cross-Cloud Services (SaaS) are new Software as a Service (SaaS), offerings that enable visibility into cloud usage, costs, improve consistency networking and security policies, automate the deployment, management and migration of applications across vSphere, non-vSphere, private, and public clouds. Central IT can create a common operating environment that supports both public clouds as well as on-premises workloads. This allows developers and businesses to freely choose the cloud they want, while protecting data and controlling costs. VMware announced that the Cross-Cloud Services, which were being shown at VMworld, include:

• Discovery and analytics: Enable discovery, onboarding, governance and governance of public clouds applications.
• Security and compliance: Micro-segmentation is used to monitor and ensure security and compliance across all clouds.
• Deployment and Migration: This gives developers the ability cross-cloud work, and IT the ability cross-cloud to manage applications with security compliance and compliance.

However, the company isn’t abandoning vCloud Air completely as it also announced:

• VMware vCloud Availability is a new set of disaster recovery services specifically designed for vCloud Air Network partners.
• VMware vCloudAir Hybrid Cloud Manager is now available. This new release will provide VMware vSphere users with zero downtime application migrations to VMware Cloud Air.

Today’s statement by Raghu Raghuram stated that customers are increasingly relying upon multiple public and private cloud services to run their applications. However, they are overwhelmed by the task of managing and securing different cloud platforms. Customers can create the strongest and most flexible hybrid cloud strategy by combining a top-of-the-line private cloud with leading public cloud providers, all enabled through VMware. VMware provides cloud freedom and control through its unique Cross-Cloud Architecture, which creates a common operating environment that all clouds can use. The company also gave more details about the Cross-Cloud Architecture. It stated that the Cross-Cloud Architecture is the most comprehensive and capable hybrid cloud architecture in the world. It enables consistent deployment models and security policies for all applications. This is regardless of whether they are running on-premises or off-premises. VMware’s Cross-Cloud Architecture builds upon its leading private and hybrid cloud capabilities, offering customers the freedom of innovation in multiple clouds. It is delivered via VMware Cloud Foundation, a new set Cross-Cloud Services that VMware is developing, and the VMware vRealize Cloud Management Platform. Redmond Magazine has more information about VMware’s announcements in the article “VMware Cross-Cloud Services Aims to Tie Largest Providers together”.