Singapore’s UOB signs up for VMware Cloud on AWS

Singapore’s United Overseas Bank (UOB) has become the first organisation in Southeast Asia to sign up for VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as part of efforts to speed up the time it takes to deploy and develop applications in a hybrid cloud environment.

Announced in 2017, VMware on AWS allows enterprises running VMware’s vSphere-based software stack to harness AWS’s bare metal infrastructure to power their applications, expand their datacentre footprint and facilitate disaster recovery.

The service was first available in the Asia-Pacific region in Sydney and Tokyo in the later part of 2018, followed by Singapore, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Osaka and Seoul throughout 2019.

In UOB’s case, VMware said it jointly engineered the service with AWS in compliance with UOB’s security requirements, allowing the bank to deploy applications with robust disaster protection and optimised access to other AWS services.

Adhunik Chug, head of group shared infrastructure services at UOB, said to improve the banking experience for customers, it is important for UOB to have the capability to be agile without compromising security.

“VMware Cloud on AWS enables us to build our innovation platform on the cloud while maintaining our robust security standards. We are pleased to be the first company in Southeast Asia to use this integrated solution to power our innovation drive,” Chug said.

Sanjay K. Deshmukh, vice-president and managing director for Southeast Asia and Korea at VMware, said VMware Cloud on AWS provides a “fast and cost-effective way to migrate mission-critical applications, or even entire datacentres, to the cloud”.

“Once in the cloud, we provide the industry-leading software-defined datacentre capabilities of VMware, coupled with the elasticity, breadth, and depth of AWS infrastructure and services, making it the ideal platform for modern applications.”

AWS’s CEO Andy Jassy had claimed that VMware Cloud on AWS was more cost-effective than other hybrid cloud offerings, with further savings if enterprises took up one-year or three-year subscriptions.

Based on VMware’s estimates, the total cost of ownership (TCO) – in terms of cost per virtual machine per hour – could range from $0.06 to $0.09, depending on an organisation’s infrastructure consolidation ratio.

In contrast, the TCO for on-premise infrastructure would be between $0.10 and $0.17, depending on the IT environment, according to VMware.

In August 2018, VMware said it would cut the entry price for VMware Cloud on AWS by half, and will offer a smaller three-host minimum software-defined datacentre configuration as a starting point for production workloads.

According to a Nutanix study, Singapore companies plan to reduce their use of traditional datacentres from 42% to 17% over the next two years. Over the same period, they are looking to increase their use of hybrid cloud by 150%.

If their plans are followed through, Singapore companies could outpace their global and regional peers in hybrid cloud use by 5% and 7% respectively.