The cloud is a unique platform that encourages collaborations from within and outside the industry, and the country. A few days ago, Hitachi and VMware inked a deal to deliver IT as a service to the Asian region. This strategic cloud partnership will make use of VMware vSphere and VMware vFabric Cloud Application Platform to assist financial institutions. Called Private Cloud for Finance Institutes, the new solution will drive IT systems costs down, improve adaptability of system with reconfigurations and innovations and deliver on the pain points where cost is impeding full deployment. Particularly, Japan financial organizations are veering away from the traditional IT architectures and now gearing towards virtualized infrastructures.

In a statement following this big announcement, COO of Information & Telecommunication Systems Company at Hitachi, Ltd Ryoichi Nakazato discusses the purpose of the team-up to Asian IT. He said, “Organizations across Asia are looking for ways to leverage modern IT infrastructures to achieve operational efficiency, increase scalability, and address critical business needs. Hitachi is now working with VMware to help financial institutions more easily realize the value of private cloud solutions and applications while providing the security and control they require.”

One of the very active leaders, when it comes to recent acquisitions and partnerships, is VMware. While EMC is not entertaining the idea of selling their VMware stakes, the latter is busy upgrading itself and boosting market initiatives. VMware continues with their shopping spree and the latest addition to their portfolio is SocialCast, a purchase that will anchor the company’s objective of intruding the social networking space. A week after outbidding Google for a prized Silicon Valley office, the enterprise built a hybrid-cloud enabled platform via virtualization. They also launched a standalone version of Converter 5.0 to preserve logical volume manager configuration.

This is not the first time that Hitachi and VMware will be working together on a project. Last February, Hitachi integrated VAAI on their virtual storage platform—a move that supports VMware’s global expansion quest.

Partnerships, especially across countries, is an important aspect of cloud expansion, as leaders like VMware seek effective ways of growing their markets.  Collaboration is also a great learning opportunity, uncovering new client needs and cloud capabilities to push us forward.  It’s clear that VMware is an integral part of the private, public and hybrid cloud movement, balancing its services across the blurring needs on the enterprise level.