After years of trying to make it in the public cloud sector, VMware has finally held up the white flag. The latest news from the technology business revealed that VMware would be officially selling off its hybrid product, known as “vCloud air”, in a deal with a French cloud hosting provider, OVH. According to announcements from a recent press release, OVH said that it’s one of the biggest cloud service providers in the world today, with more than a million customers across the globe, and over 260,000 servers deployed. The hybrid service is going to be rebranded to “vCloud Air, powered by OVH”.
A Doomed Run for vCloud Air
Back in August 2014, when vCloud Air launched for the first time, VMware had high hopes for its new hybrid service. The solution was designed to appeal directly to the industry leaders in public cloud, Amazon Web Services, otherwise known as AWS. In their plans for the future, VMWare envisioned crowds of admins for VMware using the new service to transfer various workloads back and forth between public, hybrid, and private clouds, all within the familiar confines of vSphere.
Unfortunately, vCloud Air simply never gained the traction it needed to succeed within the public realm, and it ended up lagging far behind AWS and Azure. Now, Azure and AWS still represent the clear top players within the existing market, and vCloud Air never had a chance to pose much of a threat to either. Additionally, Google is also making a strong presence for itself within the public cloud space, and IBM and other companies are trying to find their own place in the niche.
The Short-Lived History of vCloud Air
At last year’s VMworld conference, hosted in Las Vegas, the company announced that they would be creating a new partnership with AWS, who would become a provider for their cloud platform. The new service, which was christened “VMWare Cloud Foundation” integrated with VMWare’s storage, computing, and network products for virtualization, along with vCentre management, to help optimise and manage various workloads on bare-metal, elastic AWS infrastructures.
During last year’s announcement, the CEO for VMware, Pat Gelsinger, said that “AWS” will be the primary partner for VMware’s cloud infrastructure developments. The announcement of the sales of vCloud air should be a good example of VMware’s attitude regarding public cloud, which seems to be that if you can’t beat them, you might as well join them. In the OVH press release, Gelsinger said that the company will remain committed to delivering a broader cross-cloud architecture to the masses, that extends the hybrid cloud strategy and allows customers to connect, run, manage, and secure applications across various devices and clouds in a single operating environment.
