Financial services firm Clarient will use VMware’s Cloud Foundation on IBM Cloud to enhance its Entity Hub platform. The Hub already runs on IBM's bare metal servers; Clarient says the addition of VMware will lead to better server density because of its ability to control and manage hypervisors.

Clarient is one of the first customers for this private cloud offering from IBM and VMware. The two firms partnered earlier this year so they could extend existing VMware workloads from on-premises environments to the cloud without having to re-architect applications and redesign security policies.

Clarient’s Entity Hub, which lets users upload, validate, and share data securely, will now be able to take advantage of IBM’s Business Process Management software and provide customers with more visibility into their data.

IBM Cloud also provides Clarient with a low latency network that allows for near real-time communication between data centers.

The partnership between VMware and IBM was formed back in February. VMware is majority-owned by EMC, which was purchased by Dell for $67 billion. What makes this partnership particularly interesting is that IBM and Dell are fierce competitors when it comes to computer hardware and data storage. In the cloud realm, they are now partners.

IBM has about 50 cloud data centers around the globe and was recently ranked by IDC as the No. 2 provider in the overall server compute infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) arena.

In related news, Bank Sohar in the Sultanate of Oman will use IBM Cloud to streamline its IT infrastructure and more quickly to mobile. The bank is using IBM’s MobileFirst platform to manage and develop mobile banking apps.