IBM is using VMware Cloud Foundation to help enterprises address challenges and accelerate innovation

Rohit Badlaney, General Manager of IBM Cloud Product and Industry Platforms, brings more than two decades of experience in his role leading strategy, product management, design, and go-to-market for IBM Cloud. Badlaney believes that IBM stands out among other hyperscalers for being the destination for VMware workloads in the cloud.

The company’s innovative “cloud agnostic” strategy, supported by VMware’s increased capabilities post-acquisition, will promote growth for the clients, no matter if their workloads are on-premise or in a public cloud environment. With clients spanning the world’s largest banks, Fortune 500 leaders, and small- and medium-sized firms across even the most highly regulated industries, IBM is able to leverage its industry and domain expertise to evaluate use cases and workloads based on unique needs and requirements – including performance, resiliency, total cost of ownership, security, and compliance obligations.

“IBM and VMware understand that each client has a unique business, IT process and applications,” says Badlaney. “Especially for enterprises across highly regulated industries, there is increasing pressure to innovate quickly while balancing the need for them to meet stringent regulatory requirements, including data sovereignty. And now, following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware in late 2023, we have taken additional steps to expand our partnership to help enterprises become future-ready and be prepared to invest in transformative technologies like Generative AI.”

Redesigning existing IT estates to decrease cost, operational risk, and complexity can address challenges across customer service, supply chains, and the desire to have more sustainable operations. However, with many mission-critical workloads spread out across hybrid environments, including on-premises and in multiple clouds, this can present hurdles around where data lives, how it’s accessed and the necessary security and governance to cultivate trust. This, Badlaney says, is where a hybrid-by-design strategy is crucial. Organizations that make their architectures hybrid-by-design build a full stack approach for data sharing, resiliency and security with support from consulting experts and ecosystem partners to enable secured modernization for their workloads.

“We are helping clients accelerate innovation on their own terms and timeline, and this includes enabling modernization across any environment,” said Badlaney. “To achieve this, we are aligning our VMware-based services and solutions to VMware Cloud Foundation, which is one of the industry’s core software stacks that serves as the foundation of private and hybrid clouds. This will aim to make it more seamless for clients looking to transform their workloads, while addressing their security and compliance requirements.”

VMware Cloud Foundation is a refreshed strategy that offers IBM and VMware clients the ability to bring multiple offerings and licenses to IBM Cloud. The key benefit of this, Badlaney says, is that this offers clients a singular hybrid cloud aligned to a NIST-validated framework, for a seamless migration of workloads with the same tools and techniques between on premises and IBM Cloud environments. Clients can leverage thousands of hardware profiles and storage options without having to re-architect their existing applications, allowing for control of their data and where it resides. This will ultimately help accelerate and scale the impact of clients’ data and AI investments across their organizations.

“IBM was the first to run VMware workloads in the cloud and, today, we offer VMware Cloud Foundation in the cloud with options for it to be fully managed by IBM or self-managed,” he adds. “The IBM and VMware relationship goes back two decades and includes our jointly funded innovation lab.¹ This lab enables engineering teams from both companies to develop cloud-based solutions designed to ease transformation for our clients, with recent work focused on bringing IBM watsonx on-prem on VMware Private AI and Red Hat OpenShift, to help enable fast, generative AI capabilities.”

Most companies immediately associate virtualization with the software layer, but now, VMware Cloud Foundation offers a full stack that includes storage and network virtualization, as well as a management layer on top. Flexible consumption models and consolidated subscriptions are available and can help partners and enterprise clients of IBM and VMware to deliver differentiated services on IBM Cloud and in their own cloud environments thanks to the power of choice.

“For example, many organizations, particularly those in highly regulated industries, run SAP workloads on premises,” Badlaney says. “But the IBM Cloud is our premiere SAP-certified hyperscale environmentr able to run SAP-certified Power and Intel x86 production workloads on VMware – just as they have run in customers’ on-site data centers for years.”

Badlaney also notes that VMware’s addition to the Broadcom family comes at a strategic time. IBM also has a decades-long, active relationship with Broadcom, as well as extensive experience using its hardware and software across IBM’s business, including mainframes and on-premise systems. An example of this growth comes from IBM being named a VMware Cloud Service Provider Pinnacle tier partner in April 2024.

“Being a VMware by Broadcom Pinnacle partner is exciting because it is further evidence of how we are working with Broadcom to help enterprise clients optimize their investments in cloud and AI,” Badlaney says. “Clients on new VCF-as-a-Service (VMware Solutons on IBM Cloud) 1- or 3-year term contracts can get a savings of up to 50% and the VCFaaS multitenant solution is one of the lowest entry price points for VMware infrastructure in the IBM Cloud. Discounted pricing and flexible billing offer more convenient sourcing and aim to expand access to IBM and VMware joint services and solutions.”

Not surprisingly, Badlaney believes the relationship between both companies will only get stronger. “Together, we are helping modernize mission-critical workloads for many of the largest and leading corporations in the world.”

For more information on how IBM is helping clients navigate their VMware workloads and cloud strategy, visit here.

In the months to come, look to CIO.com for stories about the industry-leading providers in the Broadcom Advantage Program and insights on how they are helping enterprises succeed in their private, hybrid, and multi-cloud endeavors.

1. _{“IBM and VMware Make Their Mark with One of a Kind Joint Innovation Lab,” established by VMware and IBM, November 2018}