Just as I was thinking about starting this blog site, along came the public release of VMware’s entry in to the cloud space, vCloud Hybrid Service. I think that VMware first started telling me that I was on a “Journey to the Cloud” at VMworld way back in 2008. I guess I have been meandering a bit since then as I am not sure that I have gone too far on that journey. Admittedly, I have a lot of VMware experience within a pretty large company now, but I would not go so far as to say I was at the bleeding edge of private cloud technology.

The vCloud Hybrid Service was launched publicly on May 21st and is aimed at people like me, those people and companies who have reasons why the public cloud has just not been adopted. This new offering is definitely right up there on message with what VMware are saying this year, as I keep hearing that they want to “simplify IT, again”. From a raw, external perspective, without delving into pricing models and availability, this idea seems quite attractive. There’s been a fair amount of work behind the scenes already - the service was announced back in March and there’s a number of reference sites out there already, as those who’ve seen the launch material will know.

Now, I have no vast cloud experience at this point in time and so I have no real sense of where this offering is positioned, but then,that’s exactly what VMware are looking for. VMware want to appeal to those folks who leverage vSphere in their own datacentres and just want to spill out into the public cloud for a while or have a pressing need to expand quickly to take on an increase in demand for workloads, without having to have a retooling exercise, change IP addresses, learn a new interface or, well, anything.

However, there’s a company that offers pretty much all of that already, a rather big box shifter called Amazon, whose AWS service is marketed on its simplicity and charges only for the time you use it. vCHS is starting out of 4 locations in the US, and is slated to expand in to EMEA in 2014. I for one will be watching with interest to see how this competition develops.