Google’s CloudSimple Acquisition Puts Heat On VMware Cloud On AWS
Google Cloud has acquired CloudSimple, a startup focused on enabling VMware customers to move workloads to the public cloud.
Google Cloud is turning the heat up on VMware Cloud on AWS with the acquisition on Monday of CloudSimple, a startup focused on enabling VMware customers to easily migrate workloads to public cloud.
“VMware’s strategy is to become friends with all the public cloud providers which means AWS and Google are now all competing for mindshare of VMware customers looking to move things to the cloud,” said one CTO of a solution provider who is a top VMware partner and sells VMware Cloud on AWS. “CloudSimple with VMware and GCP looks like VMware Cloud on AWS on the surface with VMware Cloud Foundation and the capabilities inside. … It‘ll be very interesting to see how the two will stack up against each other as they fight for VMware environments.”
In July, VMware and Google unveiled Google Cloud VMware Solution by CloudSimple, which leverages VMware Cloud Foundation running on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) similar to VMware Cloud on AWS, which allows VMware software-defined data center workloads run natively on the AWS Cloud.
Google Cloud VMware Solution by CloudSimple allows customers to run VMware vSphere-based workloads in GCP. The platform leverages VMware software-defined data center technologies including NSX, vSAN and vSphere on a platform administered by CloudSimple for GCP.
[Related: 12 New VMware NSX, Security And Kubernetes Products At VMWorld]
Financial terms of the CloudSimple deal were not disclosed.
We’re excited to announce that @CloudSimple is now a part of @GoogleCloud! We’ll continue to focus on accelerating our ability to help customers easily move their @VMware workloads to the cloud. Visit our blog: https://t.co/eZlmXKz76n
— CloudSimple (@cloudsimple) November 18, 2019
Rich Sanzi, vice president of engineering for Google, said enterprises are using VMware in their on-premises environments to run a variety of workloads and are seeking a “simply way” to migrate those workloads to the cloud.
“To put it simply: [customers] want to be able to run what they want, where they want, and how they want—so they can leverage existing investments with as little toil as possible,” said Sanzi, in a blog post Monday. “Through our existing partnership with CloudSimple, our customers can migrate their VMware workloads from on-premises data centers directly into Google Cloud VMware Solution by CloudSimple, while also creating new VMware workloads as needed. 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.”
Sanzi said customers can do all this without having to re-architect existing VMware-based applications and workloads, which helps them operate more efficiently and reduce costs. In Google Cloud VMware Solution by CloudSimple, customers can migrate VMware workloads to a VMware SDDC running in GCP which benefis from GCP strengths such as our performant, secure, global and scalable infrastructure and our leading data analytics, AI and ML capabilities, according to the company.
CloudSimple's founder and CEO Guru Pangal is the co-founder of StorSimple, a cloud storage technology developer acquired by Microsoft 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,” said Pangal in a blog post on Monday. “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 are incredibly excited to be part of Google Cloud and look forward to accelerating our ability to help customers easily move their enterprise workloads to the cloud.”
Founded in 2016, Santa Clara, Calif.-based CloudSimple has received $35 million in funding from M12, Mayfield, and Redpoint Ventures. M12, formerly known as Microsoft Ventures, is Microsoft's venture capital investment arm.