As Dell buys EMC and gains control of VMware, many pundits wonder if VMware can continue to effectively partner with third-party hardware and cloud companies. The early answer appears promising -- as VMware and IBM today announced a closer cloud partnership.

Admittedly, Dell isn't expected to officially own EMC and its VMware sibling until May 2016 at the earliest. But VMware isn't sitting around waiting for alliance mandates from Michael Dell. As part of a growing relationship between IBM and VMware, the two companies are working to help "enterprise clients to extend their existing on-premise VMware infrastructure into the IBM Cloud through VMware NSX." The expanded VMware-IBM relationship surfaced today.

IBM-VMware Cloud Pricing Model

According to a joint announcement, the offering includes monthly billing and processor based pricing. And it "allows customers to easily move workloads and applications across IBM’s global network of cloud data centers without sacrificing performance or low network latency," the duo said.

Customers, the vendors said, can:

  • Perform Live Migrations — move an entire running virtual machine from one physical server to another, without downtime.
  • Focus on Storage Integration —leveraging VMware Virtual SAN.
  • Preserve Network State — Network identity and active network connections all continue to function when customers move workloads between their on-premises networks and IBM's cloud.

Dell Must Maintain VMware Alliances

Perhaps more important than the alliance details, the IBM-VMware relationship represents the ongoing need for coopetition (cooperation and competition) in the age of cloud computing.

On the one hand: Dell, EMC and VMware together will compete with IBM, HP, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle and others as customers seek to optimize on-premises and cloud workloads.

But on the other hand: VMware has relationships with most of the major server and cloud providers. As much as Dell wants to directly monetize VMware, the hardware giant will need to ensure VMware's third-party alliances remain strong...