At the heart of this debate lies the egress fees – charges cloud service providers impose when customers attempt to move their data between different platforms. For years, these fees have been a source of contention, with critics arguing that they stifle competition and inhibit the free flow of information.

Recently, Google and Amazon made headlines when they announced plans to eliminate egress fees. They cited regulatory pressure and a desire to promote fair competition. However, one major player has remained steadfast in its resistance: Microsoft.

In a recent interview, Richard Campbell, host of RunAsRadio and an industry insider with extensive Enterprise sector experience, highlighted this issue’s significance. “I have not been pushed hard on something like this in a long time,” he remarked, highlighting the gravity of the situation.

Indeed, Microsoft’s refusal to budge on egress fees has far-reaching implications. These charges hinder customers’ ability to switch between cloud providers and raise concerns about data sovereignty and privacy.

In Europe, where data protection laws are among the strictest in the world, the debate over egress fees has taken on added significance. Companies like Microsoft are under increasing scrutiny as governments grapple with how best to regulate big tech.

The timing of Google and Amazon’s announcements, coming just months before Microsoft decides to eliminate egress fees, raises questions about the role of regulatory pressure in shaping industry practices. Are these moves genuine attempts to promote fair competition, or are they preemptive measures designed to avoid government intervention?

The stakes are high for CFOs and IT decision-makers. As companies look to leverage the benefits of cloud computing while minimizing costs, the issue of egress fees looms large. For some, the solution may lie in repatriation—bringing data back in-house to avoid the hefty charges imposed by cloud providers.

But for others, the battle over egress fees is about more than just the bottom line. It’s about principles of fairness, competition, and data sovereignty. As the debate rages on, one thing is clear: the outcome will shape the future of cloud computing for years to come.

Cisco says Isovalent’s acquisition will help improve its Cisco Security Cloud and provide customers better protection across their workloads.

“Together with Isovalent, Cisco will build on the open source power of Cilium to create a truly unique multicloud security and networking capability to help customers simplify and accelerate their digital transformation journeys,” said Jeetu Patel, executive vice president and general manager of Security and Collaboration at Cisco. “Imagine in today’s distributed environment – of applications, virtual machines, containers and cloud assets – having security controls with total visibility, without hindering networking and application performance. The combination of Cisco and Isovalent will make this a reality.”

“Cisco is committed to nurturing, investing in, and contributing to the eBPF and Cilium open source communities,” said Stephen Augustus, Head of Open Source at Cisco. “Isovalent’s team will join Cisco’s deep bench of open source governance and technical leadership to solve complex cloud native, security, and networking challenges. Their knowledge will accelerate innovation across the business and help further strengthen the Cisco Security Cloud platform to meet the growing demands of our customers.”

Terms of the deal were no disclosed, but it is expected to close in the third quarter of fiscal 2024.

AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud dominate the industry, accounting for a 71% share of the market. Similarly, the three companies account for 65% of all cloud spending. Nonetheless, it appears some organizations are looking to support smaller, independent rivals.

A new report, commissioned by Linode and conducted by Techstrong Research, shows that despite 93% of respondents using one of the Big Three, two-thirds would consider an alternative.

The largest three hyperscalers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Compute) are used by 93% of respondents. Yet many DevOps buyers are re-thinking a reflex default to these hyperscalers. Two-thirds of companies surveyed would consider bringing in an “alternative” CSP; almost 22% have already done so. In fact, the combined market share for the top alternative vendors is fourth in the category, just behind Microsoft and Google.

Even more troubling for the Big Three is the growing interest in alternative providers, as well as the reasons that interest is growing.

Interest and adoption is highest in small and medium organizations (fewer than 10,000 employees). Main reasons for bringing in a new vendor include reducing reliance on a single provider, improving price performance and ease of use, and better data protection.

Another growing concern is competition from a company’s cloud service provider (CSP). Each of the Big Three are part of larger companies that offer a wide array of products and services, many of which can compete with the products and services of their cloud customers.

More than 50% of DevOps professionals and leaders surveyed say their CSP is already a competitor to their B2B or B2C business or is expected to become one. Fear of IP loss and rapid market displacement is also evidenced in respondent’s strong stated desire to work with a trustworthy, capable provider who shares their company values.

Needless to say, the Big Three hold a commanding position in the market, and it will be a long time before they face a serious challenge. Nonetheless, the report should be a cause for concern and highlights areas where they must improve in order to keep their customers happy.

Microsoft has been expanding its Microsoft Defender for Cloud to offer multicloud security. The product already supports AWS, in addition to Microsoft’s own Azure, but now the company has announced support for GCP.

Vasu Jakkal, Corporate Vice President, Security, Compliance, Identity, and Management, made the announcement in a company blog post:

Today, we’re thrilled to announce new advanced multicloud posture management capabilities for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in Microsoft Defender for Cloud to help customers proactively prevent breaches across multicloud and hybrid environments.

Microsoft is recognized as a Representative Vendor in the 2023 Gartner Market Guide for Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms.3 Microsoft Defender for Cloud became the first cloud provider to offer multicloud workload protection for cloud infrastructure, applications, and data across the full lifecycle for all three public clouds.4 Since then, we’ve rapidly expanded our CNAPP capabilities to provide advanced posture management with Microsoft Defender Cloud Security Posture Management (Defender CSPM), DevSecOps security with integrations into GitHub Advanced Security, and continued investments in our cloud workload protection (CWP) solutions across servers, containers, APIs, storage, and databases.

On August 15, 2023, Defender CSPM will extend its advanced agentless scanning, data-aware security posture, cloud security graph, and attack path analysis capabilities to GCP, providing a single contextual view of cloud risks across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, GCP, and hybrid environments.

The move will likely make Microsoft Defender for Cloud the leading multicloud security option.

Apptio’s products are designed to help companies track their spending across cloud platforms. Given IBM’s efforts to transform itself into a hybrid cloud company, the acquisition fits in with Big Blue’s long-term plans. IBM announced a $4.6 billion acquisition deal in June 2023.

According to the company, the deal has gone through, and Apptio is now part of IBM.

“The combination of Apptio products and IBM’s IT automation portfolio will give businesses a 360-degree technology management platform they can use to optimize and automate decisions across their IT landscapes,” said Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President, Software and Chief Commercial Officer, IBM. “We are bringing together market-leading and best-in-class solutions to continue to reshape IT from a cost center to a true competitive advantage, powered by automation and AI.”

“Our journey with Apptio is a testament to Vista’s ability to create consistent outcomes that drive value for our stakeholders,” said Robert F. Smith, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Vista Equity Partners. “We are proud of our continued momentum, even amidst these challenged market conditions, and look forward to seeing how Apptio’s technology will bolster IBM’s IT automation and AI capabilities in the years ahead. It’s been an honor to partner with a visionary founder like Sunny and we wish the entire Apptio team the best in the next phase of their growth with IBM.”

IBM has been working to transform itself into a hybrid could company, even going so far as to devise a plan to split into two companies and sell off parts of its legacy business. Apptio’s cloud-based platform is designed to help companies gain insights into their spending across cloud environments, including hybrid and multi-cloud. Given IBM’s focus on hybrid cloud, the Apptio acquisition makes sense.

“Technology is changing business at a rate and pace we’ve never seen before. To capitalize on these changes, it is essential to optimize investments which drive better business value, and Apptio does just that,” said Arvind Krishna, CEO and chairman, IBM. “Apptio’s offerings combined with IBM’s IT automation software and watsonx AI platform, gives clients the most comprehensive approach to optimize and manage all of their technology investments.”

“Our customers are evolving to a complex digital-first, hybrid world where technology investments are distributed and decentralized but all innovation must be aligned with clear business outcomes,” explained Sunny Gupta, Apptio co-founder and CEO. “We are so excited to be joining IBM and combining our industry leading offerings with IBM’s global presence and strong portfolio across AIOps, automation and hybrid cloud offerings.”

“We are committed to building resilient enterprise software companies, which has proven to be highly attractive to strategic and financial buyers, as well as public markets,” said Robert F. Smith, founder, chairman and CEO of Vista Equity Partners. “Our investment philosophy, value creation strategy, and industry expertise, enables us to identify and partner with companies that have the potential for long-term success. Apptio has transformed how leading organizations optimize their IT spend and performance for better outcomes. We are proud of these shared accomplishments and look forward to seeing Apptio further evolve with IBM.”

The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2023 and caps a string of hybrid cloud acquisitions IBM has made to bolster its efforts.

Cloudflare is a well-known CDN and cloud provider, while Databricks is a company specializing in providing “an open and unified platform for data and AI.” The two companies are working together to help joint customers get the most from their multi-cloud environment.

“Without an open standard for secure data exchange across organizations, companies find it highly time-consuming to collaborate, requiring export, replication and maintenance of data across many software platforms,” said Matei Zaharia, Co-Founder and CTO at Databricks. “Delta Sharing provides the first open protocol for sharing data across diverse computing platforms, clouds and regions. Today’s announcement shows just how much demand there is for this in the industry, with Cloudflare joining the ecosystem. We are excited about how this will push open interchange forward and help all of our customers collaborate more easily.”

Databricks will now support a number of Cloudflare features that will enable users to more effectively share data in a secure manner:

Databricks will now support Delta Sharing from Cloudflare R2, Cloudflare’s zero egress, distributed object storage offering. This seamless integration enables data teams to share live data sets in R2 easily and efficiently, eliminating the need for complex data transfers or duplications of data sets, and with zero egress fees. This will enable joint customers to ensure they’re sharing the most up to date data sets with their partners, suppliers, and lines of businesses, without compromising security and privacy, and without unpredictable, surprise egress fees.

“We are in the midst of an AI revolution rooted in data,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO, Cloudflare. “R2 provides an amazing value proposition for companies that suffer from vendor lock-in, and instead ensures developers retain the power to choose where to move and use their data. The combination of Cloudflare’s massive global network and zero egress storage, along with Databricks’ powerful sharing and processing capabilities, will give our joint customers the fastest, most secure, and most affordable data sharing capabilities across the globe.”

According to a draft of new legislation seen by Reuters, the EU is preparing strict rules that non-EU cloud providers must meet in order to receive the coveted cybersecurity label.

The cloud providers will be required to partner with an EU-based company in order to qualify, and would only be eligible for a minority stake in the joint venture. All data handled by the venture would need to be stored in the EU, and EU data laws would take precedent over all others.

“Certified cloud services are operated only by companies based in the EU, with no entity from outside the EU having effective control over the CSP (cloud service provider), to mitigate the risk of non-EU interfering powers undermining EU regulations, norms and values,” the document said.

“Undertakings whose registered head office or headquarters are not established in a ember State of the EU shall not, directly or indirectly, solely or jointly, hold positive or negative effective control of the CSP applying for the certification of a cloud service,” it added.

As Reuters points out, US cloud providers are likely to balk at the new legislation, and it will likely have a significant impact on the market.

2022 was not a good year for the tech industry. Despite flying high during the pandemic, an economic downturn has taken its toll, resulting in slower growth and mass layoffs.

According to CNBC, however, IBM is the exception to the rule. The company is one of only two among companies valued at $50 billion or more whose stock is up over the course of 2022. The other one is VMware, although its stock is only up because of its deal to be purchased by Broadcom.

Read more: IBM Beats Expectations on Strong Hybrid Cloud Results

IBM’s stock, which is up 6%, appears to be benefiting from the company’s long-term strategy which has reassured investors. The company has reinvented itself as a hybrid cloud provider and formed close ties with its larger cloud rivals, such as Microsoft and AWS.

As a result of the company’s strategy, Bernstein Research analysts say IBM is “trading well above its historical range.”

“Given its defensive characteristics and historical performance, we believe that IBM is likely to fare well if we continue to have pressured markets, and likely to lag major indices if we enter a recovery period,” they continued.

IBM is once again proving its ability to adapt to changing circumstances and stay relevant when many younger, more “nimble” companies struggle to keep up.

The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contact was the Pentagon’s attempt to modernize its IT operations and migrate to the cloud. AWS was largely seen as the frontrunner until Microsoft was awarded the entire $10 billion contract. AWS responded by suing the Pentagon relentlessly until the DoD canceled the contract in favor of the $9 billion multi-vendor Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC).

“The purpose of this contract is to provide the Department of Defense with enterprise-wide, globally available cloud services across all security domains and classification levels, from the strategic level to the tactical edge,” the DoD writes in the award notices. “The Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability will allow mission owners to acquire authorized commercial cloud offerings directly from the Cloud Service Providers contract awardees. Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability is a multiple award contract.”

The multi-vendor contract was awarded to AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, and Oracle. Rather than define the share of the contract each company will receive, each company is part of the same $9 billion pool and will receive funds as their services are needed.

“No funds will be obligated at the time of award; funds will be obligated on individual orders as they are issued,” the DoD continues.

Only time will tell if all four cloud players, especially AWS, accept the terms or resort to lawsuits in an effort to secure more favorable terms.

Update: Amazon has reached out to WPN with the following statement:

“We are honored to have been selected for the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract and look forward to continuing our support for the Department of Defense. From the enterprise to the tactical edge, we are ready to deliver industry-leading cloud services to enable the DoD to achieve its critical mission.”

Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure allows customers to integrate and use the two cloud platforms, making it an ideal option for hybrid cloud deployments. The new region will allow customers throughout Africa to use Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure.

“Our longstanding collaboration with Microsoft Azure gives our joint customers the flexibility and choice to innovate using the best of both our clouds. With growing customer demand for multicloud capabilities across Africa, we look forward to helping Microsoft Azure customers migrate their workloads to the cloud without the need for complicated re-platforming, while giving them seamless access to Oracle Database services on OCI,” said Nick Redshaw, senior vice president, Technology Cloud, Middle East and Africa, Oracle.

“Microsoft and Oracle share a long-standing history of delivering excellence on behalf of our mutual customers and supporting their evolving needs,” said Colin Erasmus, COO, Microsoft South Africa. “Expanding the Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure to Johannesburg ensures our valued customers in this region can benefit from the choice to deploy multicloud solutions.”

Oracle emphasized the benefits of a multicloud approach.

With Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure, customers in Africa can now migrate and run mission-critical enterprise workloads across their Azure and OCI environments with a private, dedicated low-latency connection and identity federation. Customers also receive a collaborative, comprehensive service support model. Pricing is port-based with no additional charges for bandwidth consumed.

MySQL HeatWave is billed as “the only service that combines OLTP, analytics, machine learning, and machine learning-based automation within a single MySQL database.” Oracle found many of its customers came from AWS, or are running a multi-cloud setup and want to keep costs down.

“Oracle believes in giving customers a choice. Many of our MySQL HeatWave customers migrated from AWS. Others wish to continue running parts of their application on AWS. Those customers face serious challenges including exorbitant data egress fees charged by AWS and higher latency when accessing a database service running in Oracle’s cloud,” said Edward Screven, chief corporate architect, Oracle. “We are addressing these issues while delivering outstanding performance and price performance across transaction, analytics, and machine learning compared to other database cloud providers—even Amazon’s own databases running on AWS, where you’d think they would have an advantage. We wanted to offer AWS customers this choice to benefit from MySQL HeatWave innovation without moving their data from AWS, or developers needing to learn a new platform.”

Oracle is positioning MySQL HeatWave as a multi-cloud option, with support for OCI and AWS, as well as plans to support Microsoft Azure in the near future. Oracle also provides the service for on-premise customers via Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer.

“While AWS offers a smorgasbord of cloud database services specialized for each data type and capability, MySQL HeatWave on AWS follows Oracle’s converged database strategy—offering transaction, analytics, ML, and Autopilot automation all in one. For AWS users, this means no charges for add-on services, extra storage, data egress fees, connectors, and more. For cost conscious IT teams and developers, MySQL HeatWave on AWS represents a whole new TCO calculation with zero cost for what are add-on services on AWS and no data egress fees,” said Marc Staimer, senior analyst, Wikibon. “And just as Usain Bolt left all of his competitors in the dust and set new world records that have yet to be broken, the latest price performance benchmark results demonstrate that MySQL HeatWave on AWS is 7X better than Amazon Redshift. If you follow the money, the choice is easy.”

Microsoft drew the ire of smaller EU cloud providers over terms that made it more expensive for Office 365 customers to use third-party cloud providers, rather than Microsoft’s Azure. The company outlined its plans to address the complaints and work to more fairly treat its smaller competitors earlier this week.

Despite Microsoft’s efforts to allay concerns, its rivals are not convinced, with Google Cloud Vice President of Government Affairs and Policy Marcus Jadotte slamming Microsoft’s announcement:

Jadotte contrasted Microsoft’s approach with Google’s, with the latter focused on openness and a multi-cloud approach:

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has made no secret of his desire to move from third-place to second-place in the cloud market. As part of that goal, Google has been positioning itself as a multi-cloud provider.

It remains to be seen if Microsoft’s actions will be enough to prevent a regulatory response from the EU, but it certainly hasn’t won any praise from its biggest competitors.

The cloud computing market is experiencing major growth, due in no small part to the pandemic and the rise of hybrid work. All three of the top providers are experiencing major growth, with no signs of it slowing down. According to McDermott, cloud computing’s success is because of its “pervasive” and transformative nature.

“It simplifies everything. Everything’s on the mobile. Everything’s beautiful and easy to use,” McDermott told Yahoo Finance.

“It’s one platform that can single thread business across an entire enterprise, all functions of the business. So, it is a great unifier in a sense, because some people have very powerful Chief Information Officers, others have Chief Digital Officers, others have Chief People officers, others have these wonderful data managers,” McDermott added. “But to have one platform, that single thread, all of those powerful relationships to deliver great experiences is super exciting to us.”

While the economic downturn has many companies hedging their bets and cutting costs, McDermott believes the cloud computing market can continue growing, buoyed by companies’ digital first strategies.

“Ninety-five percent of CEOs have a digital first strategy. So, they’re leaning in to digital transformation. Because it’s the only way out. On one hand, it’s software as the great deflationary force,” McDermott said. “On another hand, if you can’t transform and recreate your business model, and innovate digitally, you lose the game. So, CEOs are very well aware of this. So, that tailwind is super strong.”

McDermott’s predictions are good news for the cloud market and underscore the opportunities available to cloud providers.

Amazon’s AWS is the leading cloud provider platform, both in the private sector as well as the public. Microsoft is its largest rival, and the company is working on getting other companies to help lobby against Amazon’s dominance, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Microsoft has been sharing talking points with cloud providers Google and Oracle, as well as IBM, VMware, Dell, and HP Enterprise. The talking points are aimed at lobbying Washington to require a multi-vendor approach for large cloud contracts. According to WSJ’s sources, Microsoft has not included Amazon in its efforts.

Read more: Microsoft Azure Is a Major Threat to AWS

There’s certainly no love lost between Amazon and Microsoft, especially in their battle for the cloud market. Microsoft famously scored the Pentagon’s JEDI contract, worth some $10 billion, only to have Amazon relentlessly challenge the win in court until the Department of Defense was forced to abandon the contract in an effort to move forward with its cloud transition.

Not long after, AWS won a $10 billion contract to provide cloud services to the National Security Agency. Microsoft challenged that contract award but was unsuccessful in overturning the results.

More recently, an AWS exec took Microsoft to task over its cloud licensing terms, accusing the company of not putting customers’ needs first and engaging in anti-competitive behavior.

It appears the rivalry between Microsoft and AWS is picking up steam with no end in sight. If Microsoft is successful in rallying the smaller cloud providers to its cause, it could represent the single biggest threat that AWS has ever faced.

Oracle and Microsoft have announced Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure, a way for Azure customers to easily access Oracle Database services in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The new service builds on a partnership dating back to 2019.

“Microsoft and Oracle have a long history of working together to support the needs of our joint customers, and this partnership is an example of how we offer customer choice and flexibility as they digitally transform with cloud technology. Oracle’s decision to select Microsoft as its preferred partner deepens the relationship between our two companies and provides customers with the assurance of working with two industry leaders,” said Corey Sanders, corporate vice president, Microsoft Cloud for Industry and Global Expansion.

The service will allow customers to connect their Azure subscription to OCI. The service will automatically configure everything necessary to integrate the two platforms, providing a familiar Oracle Database Services dashboard combined with Azure terminology and the benefit of Azure Application Insights monitoring.

“There’s a well-known myth that you can’t run real applications across two clouds. We can now dispel that myth as we give Oracle and Microsoft customers the ability to easily test and demonstrate the value of combining Oracle databases with Azure applications. There is no need for deep skills on either of our platforms or complex configurations—anyone can use the Azure Portal to harness the power of our two clouds together,” said Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

The partnership between Microsoft and Oracle should help both companies leverage their respective benefits in their quest to gain more of the cloud market.

JWCC is the successor to the doomed $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract that was initially awarded to Microsoft. AWS challenged the award and kept it tied up in court for so long that the DOD ultimately abandoned it in favor of the multi-vendor JWCC. The DOD is currently seeking bids from AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle.

The Air Force has decided it doesn’t want to wait for the DOD and risk another delay. The military branch is instead moving forward with its own Cloud One endeavor.

“The short story is we’re not waiting, we haven’t waited, we will continue to not wait for anybody else to come and provide us with capability,” Air Force CIO Lauren Knausenberger told FedScoop. “We’re moving forward, we’re moving out, we’re continuing to improve” Cloud One, she added.

Knausenberger went on to call Cloud One the “world’s largest cloud instantiation for any commercial or government entity.”

The Air Force tapped SAIC to implement its own multicloud approach, using AWS, Google, and Microsoft’s cloud platforms. While the DOD is continuing to pursue the $9 billion JWCC contract, Knausenberger doesn’t see a conflict with Cloud One. In fact, if JWCC becomes a reality, she believes it may offer “better pricing on compute” and ultimately complement Cloud One.

“And if it does, we’ll still use our Cloud One as a front door and we will purchase that compute via JWCC,” she added.

Company CIO Rob Carter made the announcement at the FedEx investor day, according to DCD, saying the company will save some $400 million.

“We’ve been working across this decade to streamline and simplify our technology and systems,” he said. “We’ve shifted to cloud…we’ve been eliminating monolithic applications one after the other after the other…we’re moving to a zero data center, zero mainframe environment that’s more flexible, secure, and cost-effective.”

“Within the next two years we’ll close the last few remaining data centers that we have, we’ll eliminate the final 20 percent of the mainframe footprint, and we’ll move the remaining applications to cloud-native structures that allow them to be flexibly deployed and used in the marketplace and business. While we’re doing this, we’ll achieve $400 million of annual savings.”

FedEx currently uses both Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud for its cloud needs. Nothing was said about whether the company will go all-in on a single vendor or whether it will continue its multicloud approach.

AWS is currently the market leader, although Microsoft Azure has been making significant gains, and Google Cloud has been establishing itself as a multi-cloud provider. While the overall market continues to grow at a whopping 34%, these three providers account for 71% of the cloud market share, according to Synergy Research Group.

As the cloud market has grown, the top three providers’ share of cloud market spending has grown as well. In the first quarter of 2022, global cloud spending was $52.7 billion, with the top three raking in 65% of that. In contrast, several years ago, the top three accounted for 52% of global cloud spending, demonstrating their growing dominance in the market.

According to Synergy, smaller companies will need to differentiate themselves by targeting niche markets in order to remain competitive.

“While the level of competition remains high, the huge and rapidly growing cloud market continues to coalesce around Amazon, Microsoft and Google,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group. “Aside from the Chinese market, which remains totally dominated by local Chinese companies, other cloud providers simply cannot match the scale and geographic reach of the big three market leaders. As Amazon, Microsoft and Google continue to grow at 35-50% per year, other non-Chinese cloud providers are typically growing in the 10-20% range. That can still be an attractive proposition for those smaller providers, as long as they focus on regional or service niches where they can differentiate themselves from the big three.”

AWS is the leading cloud provider in the world and, while not cracking the top three, IBM is nonetheless a significant player. The company recently announced its intentions to split, with the core of the company focused on hybrid cloud offerings. While they may be competitors, that isn’t stopping the two companies from working together to provide IBM’s breath of software and tools on the AWS platform.

The agreement will cover IBM’s software for AI, automation, data, security, and sustainable capabilities. The solution is cloud-native on AWS, and is built on Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA).

The two companies have also agreed to work together on “a broad range of joint investments,” all with the goal of making it easier for customers to use IBM solutions on AWS.

“As hybrid cloud continues to become the reality for our clients, IBM is ready and willing to meet them with a flexible and cloud-native software portfolio wherever they are in the cloud or in data centers,” said Tom Rosamilia, Senior Vice President, IBM Software. “By deepening our collaboration with AWS, we’re taking another major step in giving organizations the ability to choose the hybrid cloud model that works best for their own needs and workloads, freeing them up to instead focus on solving their most pressing business challenges.”

“Our collaboration with IBM allows joint customers to accelerate their modernization to the cloud and consume IBM services in a cloud native manner on AWS,” said Matt Garman, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at AWS. “Through our multiyear agreement, AWS will work with IBM to offer a broad array of IBM Software as SaaS on AWS. In addition, we’ll be working together on stronger joint marketing and co-selling programs for customers.”