Google Cloud throws down the gauntlet at VMware Cloud on AWS with CloudSimple deal

Google fired a shot across the bow of VMware Cloud on AWS with its Monday deal to buy CloudSimple, which enables VMware customers to move their workloads to the public cloud.

In July, VMware and Google announced Google Cloud VMware Solution by CloudSimple using VMware Cloud Foundation running on the Google Cloud Platform, which is similar to VMware Cloud on AWS.

"Through our existing partnership with CloudSimple, our customers can migrate their VMware workloads from on-premises datacenters directly into Google Cloud VMware Solution by CloudSimple, while also creating new VMware workloads as needed," said Rich Sanzi, vice president of engineering for Google, in a blog post. "Their apps can run exactly the same as they have been on-premises, but with all the benefits of the cloud, like performance, elasticity, and integration with key cloud services and technologies.

"We believe in a multi-cloud world, and will continue to provide choice for our customers to use the best technology in their journey to the cloud."

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While Google Cloud has been busy on the M&A front, it still trails Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure by a significant margin. According to Synergy Research Group, Amazon’s share in the public cloud market remains at around the 40% mark. While Microsoft, Google and Alibaba are all slowly gaining ground, even if their market shares were combined they would still trail Amazon by a wide margin, according to Synergy Research Group.  In an effort to close the gap on AWS and Microsoft, Google Cloud has hired more sales, engineering and product managers,

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In March, VMware and AWS announced that customers could buy VMware Cloud on AWS directly through AWS and the cloud provider’s partner network. Prior to that announcement, customers could only buy the hybrid cloud service through VMware and its partners.

CloudSimple, which was founded in 2016 and based in Santa Clara, California, also has ties to Microsoft and has received funding from Microsoft's M12 division. CloudSimple CEO Guru Pangal was previously an executive for Microsoft, according to his LinkedIn profile. Pangal co-founded and was president of StorSimple, which Microsoft bought in 2012.

"The CloudSimple platform transforms bare-metal resources in public cloud data centers into 'as-a-service' private clouds which can be fast-provisioned in an automated fashion," Pangal said in a blog post. "These private clouds are managed through a single portal, enabling customers to easily access all the public cloud services while benefiting from scalable monitoring, alerting, fault tolerance and 24x7 global support of their private clouds. 

"We were very fortunate to have great partnerships with VMware, Google and Microsoft, and learnt in the process 'how to dance amongst the elephants!'"

Financial terms of the CloudSimple deal weren't disclosed.