OVH has finalized the acquisition of VMware vCloud Air’s business and specifically, vCloud Air customers, support team and data center and customer operations. VMware vCloud Air will now be branded “VMware vCloud Air Powered by OVH” and continue to provide services related to its three core offerings, namely, disaster recovery, data center replacement and data center extension. Existing vCloud Air customers stand to benefit from complementing their existing vCloud Air datacenters with OVH datacenters as well as OVH’s portfolio of private cloud and public cloud offerings, in addition to OVH’s enterprise-grade customer support. OVH’s acquisition of VMware vCloud Air marks the deepening of a long-standing partnership with VMware that includes a venerable history as a VMware vCloud® Air Network™ partner.
In the meantime, the acquisition of VMware vCloud Air, formerly owned by Dell-EMC, allows VMware to focus its cloud strategy on cross-cloud technologies as exemplified by its collaboration with AWS to deploy VMware Cloud on AWS. VMware will also continue to retain control of the VMware software-defined data center (SDDC) technology that is foundational to the vCloud Air business as it now focuses on cross-cloud technologies. The sale of VMware’s vCloud Air business to OVH allows vCloud Air to finally take flight and frees up VMware to focus on the next step of its cloud computing chapter as it relates to hybrid and multi-cloud technologies. With the vCloud air business out of the picture, expect to hear more about VMware’s updated strategy for carving out a more significant place in the cloud computing landscape in forthcoming months.