SAN FRANCISCO – IBM and VMware expanded their partnership to address the requirements of modernizing critical workloads in hybrid cloud environments for clients in regulated industries during this week’s VMware Explore 2022 event.

‘We have a very strong focus in IBM Cloud on regulated industries, that means industries like financial services, insurance, healthcare, telco, airlines, companies that really run critical infrastructure, and companies that also have a deep responsibility to steward the data of their businesses and to protect the data of their customers,” IBM Cloud CTO Hillery Hunter said during a press briefing.  

The two companies aim to help those organizations run their applications in a consistent manner across hybrid cloud environments with lower costs, said Rajeev Bhardwaj, VP and GM of cloud provider solutions at VMware.

As part of the expanded partnership, VMware named IBM Consulting as one of its Global Systems Integrator (GSI) partners to help clients’ hybrid cloud journeys.

The hybrid multi-cloud model, plus the skills and talent shortage, create complexity and gaps during business transformations. “And that's where IBM consulting comes in, and … helping the end customers in terms of migration, modernization, and managing those workloads,” Bhardwaj said. 

“IBM consulting helping plan that overall journey and modernization with IBM and VMware is an exciting opportunity for regulated industry clients to move more quickly to change the cost basis of their overall IT infrastructure to modernize the experiences of their clients and generally to digitally transform what they're trying to execute as a business,” Hunter echoed. 

IBM also announced its Cloud Satellite now supports VMware workloads in any environment where they run.

Prior to the announcement, the vendor already brought in dozens of partners like Cisco, Dell Technologies, and Intel to develop cloud services that can run across the multi-cloud and premises platform.

IBM initially unveiled its Cloud Satellite platform in 2020. The platform uses IBM’s Cloud as a base and includes IBM Cloud Observability in order to provide a centralized view of clusters and the services running within them. Running on top of that base is a control plane that abstracts away the operational details into a single management layer.

Read all of SDxCentral’s VMware Explore 2022 coverage here.