By enabling its vCloud Air public cloud service to work with Google's massive public cloud platform, VMware will expose its customers to Google services such as object storage, BigQuery, Cloud Datastore database and DNS platform. Google services will be integrated with vCA by mid-year, the companies said.
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The partnership with Google is important for VMware as it attempts to compete in the cloud market against Microsoft and Amazon. VMware has the least mature public cloud offering among its competitors, but by partnering with Google it immediately adds scale and important IaaS features.
From Google's perspective, this partnership will expose its cloud platform to VMware's enterprise customers, an audience Google is attempting to penetrate. The partnership does not include a link to all of Google's services though; most notably it does not connect Google Compute Engine (virtual machines on demand). VMware has its own compute offering in vCA.
VMware says with this partnership it will give its customers the ability to store data at low costs and run complex big data analytics job on its platform.
Google's Cloud Platform will be integrated directly into the vCA portal for VMware customers. Customers will have access to and support of Google Cloud services at no extra charge - they'll just pay for whatever Google services they use alongside any VMware services. Google cloud's APIs will work natively in vCA and the two companies are linking their networks to create dedicated private traffic connections between the clouds.
In blog posts announcing the news today, VMware officials hinted at further integrations in the future that would connect the company's popular on-premises management software to Google's public cloud, but it did not provide further details or a timeline for that.