As I am sure you have read or heard about by now, EMC has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Virtustream, a clear leader in enterprise-class managed cloud software and services. Every business and business unit in the EMC family is absolutely thrilled that Virtustream will be joining our Federation.
Why is this so important to our future? Without a doubt, our customers are rapidly moving to cloud computing, and our enterprise customers are overwhelmingly showing a preference for a hybrid cloud computing model, a model which encompasses a combination of on premise private and off premise public cloud capabilities. And, increasingly, enterprise customers are demanding managed cloud options for both on and off premise!
The EMC Federation is doing well with both our Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and VMware public vCloud Air offerings, which are both steeped in highly automated software-defined architectures. The addition of Virtustream with its leading managed cloud software and services completes the picture.
Just as importantly, Virtustream is highly focused where EMC lives: in our customers’ most mission critical applications, such as SAP. In fact, SAP has successfully partnered with Virtustream for some time now, and SAP is one of our most important and most strategic partnerships. With Virtustream, EMC will elevate our alliance with SAP as we deliver both on and off prem SAP/HANA application environments.
Virtustream’s co-founder and CEO, Rodney Rogers, will be the leader of this new managed cloud services business, and he will report directly to me. Virtustream will be a valued resource for all members of the EMC family and our partner ecosystem. Our SI and service provider partners will receive access to Virtustream’s xStream cloud management software platform, which is tightly integrated with VMware software – and our partners will be able to quickly adopt this technology and deliver their branded services on top of this platform.
For the EMC family of companies –and of course this is true for most of our IT peers – if you don’t have a cloud first strategy, you don’t have a strategy. We will do this with our partners and that will make us more relevant to our customers by doing it that way. We are incredibly excited. We believe this is a rich opportunity for us. We are all about the cloud.
