Nowadays, it seems like Amazon has a strong force in just about every market. Beyond a shadow of the doubt, it owns and operates one of the largest e-commerce sites in the world and has an extensive supply chain stretching both vertically and horizontally. In addition, Amazon now operates the Wholes Foods Market upscale grocery chain and is an ever-present force in technology innovations. What many tend to forget about Amazon is the services they provide via the cloud, and now the company is working to deepen its abilities in that space.
Amazon and VMware began their relationship back in October 2016. The partnership started out as a smaller collaboration on cloud-based, on-premise technologies. Both knew the relationship was advantageous as many system administrators were already familiar with the products of VMware and were looking for a way to take advantage of the opportunities and benefits proposed by cloud storage.
Just this week, Amazon announced plans to continue building on the partnership. Amazon Warehouse Services (AWS) have introduced a newer version of Amazon’s cloud-based database management software with VMware that will allow companies to store the data in the cloud while still using on-site data centers. Traditionally, AWS has adopted an approach which allows other companies to store their cloud information on Amazon’s technology infrastructure in massive data centers.
Essentially, the newly announced software, officially dubbed the Amazon Relational Database Service on VMware, will allow other companies and the network administrators of those companies to utilize databases across more servers, even if not hosted by Amazon. In addition, the software will support popular databases, like Oracle and Microsoft, and open-source options.
VMWare has seen remarkable growth with Amazon since the relationship first began. The number of shares outstanding has more than doubled since October 2016, and the company has been able to roll out several updates to a large number of customers.
Amazon sees this continued collaboration as an ideal way to surpass their competitors, including Microsoft’s Azure Stack. It utilizes a model similar to what Amazon is now proposing, in which on-premise software tools are similar to what is available on Azure’s public cloud. “Amazon reps today, when they hear Azure Stack, they bring in VMware Cloud on AWS,” VMware Chief Operating Officer Sanjay Poonen told CNBC. “The partnership with VMWare is the best alternative to Azure Stack.” The enhanced collaboration also poses a threat to Oracle, as Amazon continues to develop solutions which allow them to move off of Oracle’s database software.
While it is clear the collaboration has a great opportunity to benefit system administrators and companies across the globe, it is not expected there will be any impact to revenue in the fiscal year 2018 or 2019. Instead, VMWare will likely see increased revenues in the 2020 fiscal year.
