Google announces expanded partnership with VMware, will support VMware Cloud Foundation, which helps enterprises deploy and run hybrid clouds, on Google Cloud
Google today announced a new partnership with VMware that will make it easier for enterprises to run their VMware workloads on Google Cloud.
Context & Ripple Effects
This announcement closes a gap Google has been open about: VMware chose Amazon first, bringing its infrastructure software to AWS starting back in 2016 and extending VMware Cloud for AWS to European customers in 2018, leaving Google Cloud without a native path for enterprises whose virtualization estates were built on VMware.
Google has been assembling its enterprise on-ramps piece by piece — a partnership with Cisco pairing Google's data-center software with Cisco's salesforce and support, and a hybrid-cloud tie-up with Nutanix — and supporting VMware Cloud Foundation directly gives it the missing mainstream entry point. Google later doubled down on this exact workload by acquiring Microsoft-backed CloudSimple.
First-order effects
- Enterprises standardized on VMware can now run those workloads on Google Cloud without replatforming, removing the single biggest practical blocker to choosing GCP over AWS for existing estates.
- VMware gains its second major hyperscaler distribution channel beyond AWS, strengthening its position as the neutral layer across competing clouds.
Second-order effects
- AWS loses its exclusive claim as the default landing zone for VMware workloads, forcing competition on migration economics rather than availability — while Google's own Nutanix and Cisco partnerships now compete internally for which on-ramp wins enterprise budgets.
- Hybrid-cloud management tooling becomes the differentiator, pressuring both clouds to bundle orchestration and support around VMware estates rather than raw compute pricing.
Third-order effects
- If every major cloud supports VMware Cloud Foundation, the hypervisor becomes a portable commodity and cloud lock-in shifts up the stack to data, analytics, and managed services — exactly where Google's earlier integrations of BigQuery and Cloud Storage into VMware's platform pointed.
- The pattern suggests infrastructure decisions get made at the virtualization layer once and executed anywhere, pushing hyperscaler differentiation toward higher-level services and making multi-cloud brokers and management platforms the durable middle of the market.
The trend: Hyperscalers are converging on VMware as the universal enterprise on-ramp, shifting cloud competition from who hosts your VMs to who owns the data and services layered above them.