VMware Adds To Cloud Management Arsenal With DynamicOps Buy

DynamicOps, which started out as a spinoff from Credit Suisse’s IT unit, extends VMware's vCloud Director management capabilities to other vendors' public and private cloud resource pools, Ramin Sayar, VMware's vice president and general manager of cloud infrastructure and management, told CRN.

VMware customers will use vCloud Director to define multi-tenancy, and DynamicOps will coordinate the business logic and placement of which users get access to which resources. "This brings the ability to govern and control the provisioning of apps and services across heterogeneous pools," Sayar said.

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DynamicOps will help customers who are looking at other hypervisors and cloud platforms but struggling with ways to manage and operate those environments, according to Jason Nash, data center solutions principal at Varrow, a Greensboro, N.C.-based VMware partner.

"This gives vSphere customers a way to use those other platform options without depending on a third party for management support," Nash told CRN. "To me, this is about positioning vSphere as the tier 1 hypervisor in many environments and allowing IT and developers to use other hypervisors and cloud offerings as needed."

Jamie Shepard, executive vice president of technology solutions at ICI, a Marlborough, Mass.-based solution provider, expects to see VMware integrate elements of DynamicOps, vCloud Director and Horizon, VMware's cloud-based identity system for managing the explosion of mobile devices and SaaS apps in businesses, into a self-service portal for cloud resources.

"Customers really want service catalogs," Shepard told CRN. "This is about taking advantage of hosted, private and public cloud infrastructure, with DynamicOps serving as the intelligence behind the scenes."

VMware intends to integrate DynamicOps with vFabric Application Director, the cloud-enabled application provisioning technology that debuted in February. Integration with IT Business Management Suite, a set of VMware tools for tracking costs and service levels across different infrastructure pools and service providers, is also in the cards, said Sayar.

Terms of the DynamicOps deal weren't disclosed. But GigaOM, quoting unnamed sources, reported that it's in the $100 million to $150 million range.

PUBLISHED JULY 2, 2012