IBM and VMware announced a partnership at IBM InterConnect 2016 to help enterprises take better advantage of the cloud’s speed and economics.
IBM said the new agreement will enable enterprise customers to easily extend their existing workloads from their on-premises software-defined data center to the cloud.
Under the partnership, IBM and VMware will provide the expertise, solutions, and cloud infrastructure to help customers manage and scale their IT resources running in private and public clouds.
IBM said through sophisticated workload automation, clients will have the ability to quickly provision new or scale existing workloads to the IBM Cloud.
Further, VMware customers will be able to use a flexible, monthly-based consumption pricing model that makes it more cost effective for users by enabling a simple pay-as-you-go option.
The IBM Cloud will be a showcase platform in the VMware vCloud Air Network cloud provider ecosystem.
In a separate announcement, IBM said it is extending its pervasive software platform to the cloud, helping enable clients to connect to data, application or transaction system.
This move aims to make it easier for developers to unlock the valuable data, knowledge and transaction systems, such as supply chain, inventory management systems and detailed customer records, at the center of global business.
Core to this announcement is IBM WebSphere connect, which extends IBM’s WebSphere portfolio to the cloud. With more than 200 million global licenses of WebSphere, IBM’s middleware portfolio is the leading platform for Java EE.
Today’s news will make it easier for the estimated 13 million Java developers worldwide to connect their apps to the cloud, and continue to extend WebSphere to a whole new community of node.js and Swift developers. Moving forward, WebSphere clients can access new features from the IBM Cloud.
The third announcement from IBM was the next phase of its roadmap to bring Swift to the Cloud with a preview of a Swift runtime and a Swift Package Catalog to help enable developers to create apps for the enterprise.
IBM is the first cloud provider to enable the development of applications in native Swift – an intuitive programming language introduced in 2014.
IBM said today’s announcement is a key next step in IBM and Apple’s shared journey to help enterprises advance their mobile strategy.
