How VMware has become a major player in the cloud

12.28.2020

For about 6 years, VMware has deployed an ambitious strategy of repositioning its offer. Originally a leader in virtualization, the American has succeeded in becoming a key player in the cloud, and not just any old way: thanks to a sustained policy of external growth.

In fact, since 2014, VMware has made no less than 35 acquisitions, which have enabled it to invest in all key areas of the cloud: Kubernetes, FinOps, managed management service in the cloud, PaaS, Disaster Recovery in the cloud … Inaugurated in 2014 with the acquisition of AirWatch for the MDM part, the VMware acquisition strategy has continued to intensify since.

Thus, the takeover of CloudHealth in 2018 marks a desire to position itself on FinOps, in order to allow users to monitor and optimize the costs of their Cloud infrastructure.

Later, it is Kubernetes applications that are the target of VMware through the acquisition of Heptio in 2018, then of Octarine, which fell into the hands of the American giant in May 2020.

The list goes on: Multi-cloud application management (BitRock), PaaS (Pivotal), Cloud security (Intrinsic, Carbon Black, Lastine), “Disaster Recovery as a Service” (Datrium), SD-WAN (VeloCloud Networks) , Mode.net)…

VMware has thus been able to develop complete portfolios entirely dedicated to the Cloud (such as its Tanzu Application Catalog range) and forge partnerships with the main market players: AWS, Azure, Google.

This active buyout strategy has resulted in several ambitious initiatives: the VMware Cloud Foundation, a hybrid cloud platform, the Tanzu portfolio of solutions, for new generation cloud architectures, Project Pacific, for the deployment of Kubernetes applications in vSphere, as well as Project Monterey, which focuses on the hardware layer of the data center infrastructure to make it scalable and multi-tenant.

VMware has therefore succeeded in the challenge of moving from being a benchmark player in the private cloud to that of a leader in public and hybrid cloud environments in just a few years. Yet the competition between cloud giants has never been fiercer. In particular, IBM is pursuing a similar strategy of diversifying into hybrid environments, with an otherwise considerable strike force.

Sources: Journal du NetForbesNext Platform