It may have taken awhile, but it appears VMware has finally achieved a level of critical mass in cloud. At the online VMworld 2020 conference this week, VMware revealed more than 160,000 end customers are now running more than 15 million enterprise workloads on VMware in the cloud.
Much of that growth is being spurred by adoption of VMware Cloud on AWS. VMware reports that as of August, the total number of its virtual machines on AWS are up 140 percent year-over-year, with the total number of hosts up by 130 percent during the same timeframe.
VMware also notes there are now more than 300 certified or validated technology solutions available to VMware Cloud on AWS customers. In total, there are now more than 4,300 partners offering VMware-based cloud services, with more than 600 channel partners having achieved a VMware Cloud on AWS service competency.
The unit of Dell Technologies also disclosed more than 10 million virtual machines have been deployed in more 10,000 data centers run by cloud service providers, representing a 173 percent growth rate year over year.
Cloud adoption timelines continue to push forward
A recent survey of 1,054 IT and business professionals conducted in June by Faction, a provider of IT services, suggests that momentum is only going to accelerate in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. More than half (51 percent) of all respondents are either accelerating their cloud adoption timeline or moving forward as planned.
Among respondents considering deploying workloads on VMware Cloud on AWS, the percentage is eight points higher (59 percent), with scalability cited as the primary driver by more than half of respondents (52 percent). A quarter of respondents (25 percent) planning to make that transition said they will look to add or increase workloads on VMware Cloud on AWS in the next 12 months.
Top use cases among IT organizations currently running VMware Cloud on AWS are data center extension (26 percent), AWS integrated applications (22 percent) and cloud migration (18 percent). Among those considering VMware Cloud on AWS, the top use cases cited are data center extension (25 percent), disaster recovery (23 percent) and test & development (17 percent).
Put it altogether and it’s clear managed service providers (MSPs) should expect to see a lot more VMware in cloud, especially on Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platforms, where VMware virtual machines are just starting to gain traction.
Of course, there are still many more open source virtual machines running in the cloud than there are proprietary instances of VMware. Less clear going forward is the level of opportunity for MSPs. A large percentage of the virtual machines deployed in the cloud are managed by either the provider of the virtual machine or the cloud service provider.
The good news is there’s still plenty of room for MSPs, on behalf of their customers, to deploy vast quantities of tools and applications on top of those platforms. Moreover, somebody has to help IT organizations migrate many of their existing workloads to the cloud. As such, MSPs that have VMware expertise should expect to be busy for many years to come.
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