Verizon teams with VMware on computing-as-a-service

A new computing-as-a-service offering from Verizon, announced today, aims to make it easier for enterprise customers to dynamically move a portion of their IT resources to the carrier’s cloud while continuing to manage other IT resources in house.

The new offering, scheduled to be available in early 2011, is based on a platform from VMware, which will be hosted in several Verizon data centers worldwide, said Joe Crawford, executive director of IT solutions for Verizon.

An important feature of the new offering, Crawford said, is that customers will be able to utilize “existing tool sets and frameworks that they use internally and use them to move [workloads] into the Verizon cloud.” Some other CaaS solutions require enterprise customers to use a tool set provided by the carrier to handle that task, adding an extra level of complexity and complicating the process of retrieving IT resources back from the carrier cloud, he added.

Verizon also announced that InterContinental Hotels Group has used the new CaaS solution as a platform for online employee training. The company was motivated to use the cloud-based solution because it enabled employees around the world to interface with a regionally located data center rather than relying on a single company-operated data center, Crawford said.

VMware seems to be gaining traction with service providers. In a separate announcement today, NTT America said it is using VMware’s vCloud Director to offer cloud services to enterprise customers. The vCloud Director software enables customers to create pools of computing, networking and storage resources with defined management policies and performance levels, NTT said. The underlying platform for Verizon’s offering is the VMware vCloud Datacenter, which incorporates vCloud Director and other VMware technology.

Joe Andrews, group manager of vCloud product marketing for VMware, said the company expects to make announcements with other service providers in the future.

The two VMware announcements came just a day after Citrix Systems announced several initiatives that appear targeted toward displacing VMware from its dominant position in the cloud-based virtualized computing market