Dell Technologies, Microsoft expand Cloud partnership

In a bid to accelerate digital transformation and address a wider range of customer needs, Dell Technologies and Microsoft have extended their partnership at the "Dell Technologies World 2019" to deliver a fully native, supported and certified VMware Cloud infrastructure on Azure.

"VMware brings the power of virtualising all your infrastructure, including the network and delivering the software defined future from the edge to the core to the multi cloud. We`re partnering with all the multi clouds. We`re also embracing Kubernetes. This is important because application, data and workloads must move back and forward dynamically in an increasingly distributed network, including the explosion in the edge and the Internet of Things (IoT)," Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO, Dell Technologies, told the media here on Monday during the first day of its annual user conference.

Under the collaboration, joint Microsoft 365 and VMware Workspace ONE customers would be able to manage Office 365 across devices via Cloud-based integration with Microsoft Intune and Azure Active Directory.  VMware would also extend the capabilities of Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop by leveraging VMware Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure.

"At Microsoft, we`re focused on empowering customers in their digital transformation journey, through partnerships that enable them to take advantage of the Microsoft Cloud, using the technologies they already have," said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. "Together with Dell Technologies and VMware, we are providing our mutual customers with an integrated Cloud experience and digital workplace solutions to open up new opportunities and meet their evolving needs."

According to Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, their customers are increasingly using Azure, hence, it made sense for VMware to work with Microsoft to make their technologies more compatible. "Customers are excited to see us expand our collaboration with Microsoft," said Gelsinger while adding, acethese innovative Cloud and client offerings will deliver customers even more value, provide more flexibility to accelerate their hybrid multi-Cloud and multi-device journey, and accelerate the digital transformation of their business."

Azure VMware Solutions are built on VMware Cloud Foundation, which is a comprehensive offering of software defined compute, storage, networking and management, deployed in Azure. With these solutions, customers can capitalise on VMware`s broadly deployed Cloud infrastructure while experiencing the power of Microsoft Azure.

Azure VMware Solutions also give customers the power to seamlessly migrate, extend and run existing VMware workloads from on-premises environments to Azure without the need to re-architect applications or retool operations. Customers would also be able to build, run, manage, and secure new and existing applications across VMware environments and Microsoft Azure while extending a single model for operations based on established tools, skills and processes as part of a hybrid Cloud strategy.

Some of the more popular customer scenarios Azure VMware Solutions would support are app migration and data centre expansion, disaster recovery and business continuity and modern application development.