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VMware today expanded its partnership with IBM to better support enterprises in regulated industries, such as financial services, healthcare and public sector with the goal of modernizing mission-critical workloads and expediting time to value in hybrid cloud environments.

At the ongoing VMware Explore conference, the virtualization tech company announced the inclusion of IBM Consulting as one of its first GSI (global system integrator) partners. IBM and VMware’s partnership has been active for over two decades, with the former being the largest operator of VMware workloads in the world. With the latest development, IBM will be not only operating the clouds but also doing the job of a consultant for the customers using those environments.

“As customers go through their cloud journey, looking at multi-cloud (on-prem clouds and IBM clouds), there’s a lot of complexity to deal with. On top of that, there is a serious gap in terms of skills and talent and a dire need to move faster. This is where IBM Consulting comes in. It helps end-customers in terms of migration, modernization and managing these workloads,” Rajeev Bhardwaj, VP/general manager for cloud provider solutions at VMware, said.

As a GSI partner, IBM Consulting will be able to provide the deep skills and expertise required to help with the security, management and reliability needed to run applications across more than one cloud. This will ultimately help companies deliver better experiences to their customers and comply with industry regulations.

IBM Cloud Satellite for VMware

At the event, the companies also announced the plan to enable IBM Cloud Satellite for VMware. 

Launched in 2021, IBM Cloud Satellite is a management platform IBM created to centralize the management of hybrid cloud computing environments. It brings a secured and unified layer of cloud services for clients across environments, regardless of where their data resides. With the latest development, this offering will be able to support on-premises VMware workloads, bringing enhanced security and open innovation of IBM Cloud services to the customer’s data center.

“IBM Satellite for VMware brings consistent infrastructure, operations and enhanced security and innovation around regulated and financial services cloud from IBM cloud and delivers it on customer on-prem,” Bharadwaj said.

Joint innovation expansion

Beyond this, VMware and IBM are also extending the pipeline of their Joint Innovation Lab (JIL) for another three years.

Started in 2018, JIL brings together engineering, sales, marketing and enablement capabilities from both companies to serve as a co-innovation engine for solving client problems. So far, it has delivered 20 hybrid cloud and AI-focused projects to extend the capabilities of IBM Cloud and address enterprise needs for mission-critical VMware workloads. This includes a VMware-enabled reference architecture that was developed and integrated into the IBM Cloud for financial services offerings as well as encryption for data at rest, data at motion and data in use.

“We are announcing our next set of capabilities in terms of how we are going to bring joint innovations to the market. Examples include desktop-as-a-service, especially for hybrid environments and remote workforces, and accelerated application modernization on IBM Cloud with the VMware stack powering that. Then, it’s all about applications so we’re going to be working on how do we accelerate the applications and how do we improve the resilience of the applications, meaning load-balancing capabilities, security capabilities with the web application firewall and analytics,” Bharadwaj explained.

VMware Explore kicked off on August 29 and will continue until September 1, 2022.