Bill Fathers, SVP and GM at Cloud Services, VMware, discussed the company’s hybrid and public cloud strategies with theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante, live at VMWorld 2013.

Talking about hybrid cloud adoption in the enterprise, Fathers explains, “every enterprise client we speak to has already started to experiment with public cloud,” they are already experimenting VMware and private cloud. Thus, “we’re focusing on offering a public cloud solution that’s entirely compatible with their private cloud.”

The challenge of hybrid cloud is that “you’ve got to sort out a lot of stuff at the infrastructure layer” to make it work. The industry is still a few years out from having a solution allowing apps fully function in the hybrid cloud.

Disaster Recovery Goes Hand in Hand with Hybrid Cloud

Commenting on VMware’s disaster recovery strategy, Fathers said DR was the perfect use case for the hybrid cloud, allowing the creation of a DR environment that is compatible with the on premise hybrid. vCloud hybrid cloud, as a DR scenario, will start with data replication and some orchestration, and future development will add increased automation.

DR is an area where a lot of professional services help is required to re-engineer the processes. “We’re probably going to create some professional services engagement packages that can help clients prepre for DR,” Fathers said.

VMware Public Cloud – Openness, Guaranteed Access to Service, Absolute Compatibility

Dave Vellante points out that Amazon is the gold standard of the public cloud at the moment and asked how VMware plans to compete with its offer. More specifically, he asks what part of their public cloud strategy is functional, and what will be added later on. “Today the underlying infrastructure itself is ready to go, it does provide the SLA, the governance, and the guaranteed access to services,” responds Fathers. When using VMware’s public cloud services, “you know for sure your application is going to run,” thus “the main differentiator is absolute compatibility,” and customers would no need to go through 3-4 months of testing which they’d have to do to put apps on other public clouds.

Although Amazon’s SLAs were harshly criticized, Vellante said it was hard to find public cloud companies that are transparent on their SLA. He asked how VMware would approach the transparency issue. “We’re going to be very transparent and have industry leading SLAs,” Fathers states. Clients already trust their mission critical services on the VMware platform, they will need very high level SLAs to trust them to the public cloud.

Rish Sharing Strategy to Attract Enterprise Clients

“You can’t get into the services business and talk to enterprise clients about moving meaningful workload, without having the conversation about risk,” Fathers said, adding VMware will take a shared risk approach with its public cloud customers. It’s a question of measured risk that’s shared. “You can’t go into the services market and not share the risk with the clients.

Enterprise customers  had zero tolerance on outages, Furrier notes, asking how VMware will address the scale growing pains problems and alleviate fear. Fathers says, “We’re feeling very confident on basing our product on VMware technology.” The company’s approach involves spending time and effort to get the product right, as well as creating relationships with service providers, asking them to look at its cloud offerings, try vCloud and sell it to their customers. This up-front effort allows Cloud Services to leverage their extensive scale and experience.