VMware’s recent partnership on public cloud with Amazon Web Services (AWS), seems to have opened the doors for the sale of its competitor platform.
The virtualization giant announced Tuesday that it will be selling its hybrid cloud product, called vCloud Air. This is a sign that it has given up on its long-running attempt to compete in the public cloud space. According to the press release, OVH, a French cloud hosting provider, will acquire the business from VMware.
When vCloud Air was launched officially in August 2014, VMware had high expectations. Originally dubbed “vCloud Hybrid Services”, it was aimed directly towards AWS, the public cloud leader. VMware envisioned vCloud Air being used by scores of VMware admins to move workloads between public, hybrid, and private clouds all within the familiar vSphere environment.
However, vCloud Air was never able to gain significant traction in public and lagged behind Azure and Microsoft’s competitors, AWS. AWS and Azure remain the clear No. AWS and Azure are still the No. 1 and No. 2 players in the field, respectively. There were 2 players in this field, and vCloudAir never threatened. Google is now making a strong push in the public cloud space, led by former VMware CEO Diane Greene, and IBM and other companies are also trying to stake their claim. However, AWS and Azure remain at the top of the leaderboard.
Since last fall’s VMworld conference, Las Vegas, the signs were there that vCloud Air was on the horizon. VMware announced a partnership with AWS shortly after the event to become a provider of its cloud platform. “VMware Cloud Foundation” is a new service that integrates VMware’s compute storage, network virtualization, and management products. It optimizes and runs workloads on elastic, bare metal, AWS infrastructure.
Last year, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger stated that AWS would be VMware’s primary partner in cloud infrastructure.
Gelsinger spoke out Tuesday about the sale vCloud Air. He said that VMware’s new “if they can’t beat ’em”, attitude towards public cloud was evident in his statement. “We remain committed delivering our broader Cross-Cloud Architecture, which extends our hybrid cloud strategy, enabling our customers to run and manage, connect and secure their apps across clouds and devices within a common operating system.
