IBM Spin-Off Kyndryl Expands VMware Partnership

‘VMware, like Kyndryl, is newly independent and a leader in helping customers bring their existing applications to the cloud, as well as helping to create new cloud-native offerings,’ Kyndryl CEO Martin Schroeter said in a statement Friday.

Kyndryl, the recent spin-off of IBM’s managed infrastructure business, has recently expanded its partnership with VMware and achieved an SAP certification related to cloud operations.

The announcement comes soon after VMware’s own newly achieved independence after Dell Technologies spun off its majority stake in the virtualization giant and Kyndryl’s announcement that Microsoft is a Premier Global Alliance Partner.

“VMware, like Kyndryl, is newly independent and a leader in helping customers bring their existing applications to the cloud, as well as helping to create new cloud-native offerings,” Kyndryl CEO Martin Schroeter said in a statement Friday.

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Schroeter said that New York-based Kyndryl’s newfound freedom to boost non-IBM partnerships will “enable customers to run, modernize and transform their operations even faster and maintain enterprise control, and to do so securely and reliably with the best technology and solutions designed and built for a world of distributed work.”

A Kyndryl representative was not available to comment before publication.

Some of the companies’ existing joint solutions include software defined networking services, workload migration, cross-cloud deployment, containers networking and management, automation and provisioning, according to VMware.

Kyndryl and VMware will focus on expanding application modernization, digital workspace services, security, edge computing and multi-cloud services, among other areas, according to a statement Friday. The partnership will combine Palo Alto, Calif.-based VMware’s solutions with Kyndryl design, build and managed services.

The collaboration will result in more advisory, implementation and management services to support VMware Tanzu and deploy vSphere workload to VMware multi-cloud infrastructure in all public clouds.

The two companies will collaborate on a Joint Innovation Lab to develop new solutions. Kyndryl also started a similar lab with Microsoft.

VMware has collaborated with IBM for more than 20 years, according to the statement. Kyndryl has “thousands of skilled professionals with VMware certifications,” according to the company.

The new SAP certification for operations capabilities in global cloud and infrastructure operations should allow for more joint opportunities managing SAP operations on cloud and on-premises with end-to-end automation technology, according to Kyndryl. The certification will result in more trained Kyndryl employees on SAP HANA and more work migrating customers to public cloud hyperscalers.

Before Kyndryl spun off, the company revealed in regulatory filings that it had a relationship with VMware and Microsoft even as a division of IBM.

“We have a strong and long-standing foundation developed by governing and managing complex technology environments, including IBM (e.g., Red Hat and Cloud Paks) and third-party technologies (e.g., VMWare, ServiceNow, and Microsoft),” Kyndryl said in the filing. “With increased freedom of action, we will extend these capabilities to an even broader ecosystem of technology providers and develop more services that are digitally consumable to expand accessibility to new customers and markets.”