IBM announced that it has been honored as a winner of a VMware 2016 Global Partner Innovation Award in the Integrate Public Clouds category. IBM was recognized at the VMware Partner Leadership Summit 2017, held in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.

"Enterprises are rapidly adopting the cloud for the agility it delivers and the cognitive and big data innovation it enables,"said Faiyaz Shahpurwala, general manager, IBM Cloud. "IBM and VMware working together allows enterprises to easily transform and integrate existing VMware environments into highly scalable and global hybrid cloud deployments."

Building on more than 14 years of collaboration, in 2016, IBM and VMware began working together to tackle the challenge of extending VMware workloads from on-premises environments to the public cloud without incurring significant cost and risk associated with retooling operations, re-architecting applications and re-designing security policies. Since then, many customers have begun moving their VMware environments to IBM Cloud including BMSIX and Dream Payments. Many VMware users leverage IBM's cloud platform and benefit from IBM's growing footprint of more than 50 highly-scalable and security-rich cloud data centers in 19 countries across the globe.

"VMware is pleased to recognize this year's Global Partner Innovation Award winners, which are given to a select group of partners for their exceptional efforts in 2016,"said Geoff Waters, vice president, Global Cloud Sales, VMware. "VMware is proud to see IBM win the Global Integrate Public Clouds award, and we look forward to our continued collaboration."

Recipients of a Global VMware Partner Innovation Award were acknowledged in 21 categories for outstanding performance and distinctive achievements during 2016.