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Google is to start offering IBM’s server ecosystem to cloud customers in another boost to its hybrid strategy.
Partners of IBM will now be able to offer its Power Systems as a service on Google Cloud using the latter's marketplace for integrated billing.
Meanwhile, Google Cloud partners will also have an added tool in their arsenal as they can offer customers an on-ramp for their existing legacy infrastructure and workloads, especially those not easily migrated to the cloud.
“Enterprises looking to the cloud to modernise their existing infrastructure and streamline their business processes have many options,” said Kevin Ichhpurani corporate vice president of global ecosystem at Google Cloud.
“At one end of the spectrum, some organisations are re-platforming entire legacy systems to adopt the cloud. Many others, however, want to continue leveraging their existing infrastructure while still benefiting from the cloud’s flexible consumption model, scalability, and new advancements in areas like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and analytics.”
IBM Power Systems already offers customers the option to migrate legacy resources into its own cloud. However, the partnership means Big Blue is now effectively working with one of its most significant cloud competitors.
In Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant release for cloud infrastructure, Google significantly outpaced IBM, gaining status as a ‘Leader’, while the latter remained in the ‘Niche’ quarter below Oracle and Alibaba.
Google Cloud upped its play into hybrid cloud last year with the launch of its cloud management platform Anthos.
According to Google Cloud, the move will benefit enterprise customers using IBM Power’s Systems’ to run workloads such as SAP applications and Oracle databases on the cloud without having to re-engineer their infrastructures.
Google Cloud will also offer private API access, customer support and deployment via a new management console.
