Kyndryl continues to make good on its intent to expand its partner base after separating from IBM. This time, Kyndryl and VMware are teaming up. Together, the companies will focus on app modernization and multicloud services.

The news comes as Kyndryl in early November wrapped its spinoff from IBM, and as VMware completed its separation from Dell Technologies.

Now, Kyndryl and VMware are unfettered in their efforts to help enterprises undergo digital transformation. They will do this by combining VMware’s platforms with Kyndryl’s managed services. Those include design, building and ongoing oversight. Much of the work between Kyndryl and VMware will surround multicloud environments.

VMware’s Susan Nash

“Multicloud is the digital business model for the next 20 years,” said Susan Nash, senior vice president, strategic corporate alliances, at VMware. “With the average organization running hundreds of apps across many different clouds, customers need solutions and strategic partners that enable their organizations to be as agile and resilient as possible. This is the power of the VMware and Kyndryl partnership. … Together, we will empower customers to achieve smarter paths to cloud, edge and app modernization; provide autonomy for developers; and enable a more secure, frictionless distributed workforce.”

Part of those initiatives will entail Kyndryl and VMware creating new applications for distributed workforces. The companies did not give examples of what those applications might do. Presumably, though, they will support collaboration and productivity among teams working in remote locations; plus, those in the office either full- or part-time, all or largely through cloud technologies.

Kyndryl and VMware have partnered for more than 20 years, under different names (in Kyndryl’s case) and under different corporate structures (in both cases). Their current union tackles modern technology challenges, including multicloud infrastructure and management, digital workspace services, managed applications, resiliency and security, and network and edge computing.

Helping Clients ‘Reap the Benefits’ of Cloud

Kyndryl’s Stephen Leonard

“Kyndryl and VMware will help companies design and deploy mission-critical workloads that can modernize their applications and operations to reap the benefits of cloud and multicloud computing,” said Stephen Leonard, global alliances and partnerships leader at Kyndryl.

To support those goals, Kyndryl and VMware have aligned their capabilities at the local, regional and global levels. That means they have the people and resources in place for solutions planning, investment and execution. They also operate a Joint Innovation Lab where they develop new delivery models. Right now they are creating programs that address app modernization, containers, observability and security with VMware Tanzu, as well as multicloud management solutions. Regarding the latter, Kyndryl and VMware further will deliver VMware Cross-Cloud services. Those provide infrastructure and applications services and support regardless of the underlying cloud provider environments.

Kyndryl said it also plans to work with VMware to expand its multicloud advisory, implementation and management services for the VMware Tanzu platform. In addition, the managed services firm will deploy vSphere workloads to VMware multicloud infrastructure running in all public clouds.

VMware marks Kyndryl’s second major partnership announcement since the IBM spinoff. Microsoft stands out as the first. With that deal, Kyndryl and Microsoft (already long-term partners, like Kyndryl and VMware) will focus on hybrid cloud migrations. So with VMware, Kyndryl is covering its multicloud bases.

No doubt, Kyndryl’s alliances with VMware, Microsoft and others are crucial to its success as a standalone endeavor. Even though the company reported revenue of $19.1 billion last year, projections for sales in 2021 look to fall by 2.6%. At the same time, analysts say they do not expect growth until 2025. In other words, Kyndryl has a lot to prove as an entity independent of longtime parent IBM, the behemoth that is itself no stranger to meet high expectations amid organizations’ changing needs.