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.
