Telstra today announced an Australian first to host and deploy VMware’s cloud service, VMware vCloud® Air™ out of Telstra’s connected data centres – a move that will enable new and existing VMware customers to extend or move their on-premise IT infrastructure seamlessly to a public cloud.

This new partnership is another key milestone in Telstra’s global cloud strategy to provide customers with choice and flexibility as they look to adopt an efficient and agile hybrid cloud environment.

Speaking today at VMware’s vForum™ conference in Sydney, Erez Yarkoni, Executive Director Cloud, Telstra Global Enterprise and Services, said the decision to host and deploy vCloud Air will give customers more options as they connect to and leverage the cloud.

“As part of our overarching cloud strategy, Telstra is committed to expanding our capabilities by working with global leaders in cloud services. Partnering with VMware is another example of us delivering on that commitment, providing our customers with greater flexibility and choice when it comes to selecting and deploying their cloud services,” he says.

“We have seen strong uptake in Australia of public cloud services. However, we are also seeing increasing interest from customers to identify different cloud strategies appropriate to their individual business needs. We are providing our customers with solutions that enabled multi cloud-environments, so they can optimise performance, cost and flexibility across multiple applications and workloads.

“Telstra is focused on simplifying cloud adoption and VMware vCloud Air is a world-class, production-ready environment capable of running our customers’ mission-critical workloads. This is all from a single management interface customers already know, with the control and the agility necessary to deliver high performance and results – a service offering we’re excited to give our customers,” Yarkoni adds.

VMware vCloud Air is built on VMware vSphere® and offers two distinct infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) compute offerings - Dedicated Cloud and Virtual Private Cloud. It is designed to offer market leading hybrid cloud solutions, whether a customer wants to extend an on-premise data centre to create a hybrid cloud environment or start a new public cloud deployment.

Duncan Bennet, Managing Director, VMware Australia and New Zealand added, “Eighty per cent of Australian enterprises already run VMware virtualized environments and this expanded partnership with Telstra will create an even smoother pathway to the cloud for customers adopting a hybrid model. The flexibility and freedom VMware vCloud Air, coupled with the performance and resiliency of the Telstra network, will be a very exciting combination for organisations looking to a hybrid cloud solution.”

The service is expected to be available in first half of 2015.

VMware, vCloud Air, vCloud and vSphere are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions