VMware shifts away from public cloud hosting with sale of vCloud Air to OVH
VMware is selling its vCloud Air business to OVH.
VMware is selling its infrastructure-as-a-service offering vCloud Air to global hyperscale cloud provider OVH.
VMware launched vCloud Air Network in 2014 with the aim of providing greater flexibility to users of VMware technology. Three years on, its public cloud business is set to be bought by French cloud computing and web hosting company OVH.
What a hybrid cloud is in the 'multi-cloud era,' and why you may already have one
In an interview with Fortune, VMware chief executive Pat Gelsinger said the sale will include vCloud operations and sales staff, datacenters, and customers. The financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, and the buyout is expected to be completed during the second quarter of this year.
Once the sale is completed, OVH will operate the service as 'vCloud Air Powered by OVH', continuing to use VMware's hybrid cloud technology and working with VMware to provide customer support for datacenter extension, datacenter consolidation, and datacenter recovery.
"We have enjoyed a long and successful partnership with OVH and view this acquisition as an extension of our partnership and a positive for our customers and partners," Gelsinger said in a statement about the planned deal.
"Customers will have access to OVH's global footprint, high-touch customer support, and still retain the VMware SDDC technology innovation that they are accustomed to," he added.
One of the world's largest cloud service providers, OVH has over a million customers and 260,000 servers in datacenters across four continents. The company is looking to the VMware acquisition to aid large enterprise demands for hybrid cloud, and help it break into the US.
"With this acquisition, OVH will offer a very unique value proposition for larger enterprise deployments, including rich capabilities for migration and advanced hybrid functionalities for virtual data centers. This will benefit all our clients across the globe," said Octave Klaba, chairman and CEO of OVH.
VMWare's decision to sell its public cloud offering comes as the company looks to concentrate on providing hybrid and cross-cloud software and services.