Kyndryl (NYSE: KD) and VMware (NYSE: VM) today announced an expansion of the companies’ strategic partnership focused on app modernization and multi-cloud services. This collaboration will enable customers to enhance their digital innovation and business transformation with enterprise control.

The primary goal of the expanded partnership is to accelerate IT and business reinvention for customers through the combination of VMware solutions and Kyndryl’s design, build and managed services. The companies also aim to help customers speed their digital transformations by rapidly building and deploying new, more secure applications designed and built for a world of distributed work.

As Kyndryl and VMware begin their respective journeys as stand-alone companies, they share a productive relationship built on more than 20 years of collaboration between VMware and IBM that has consistently provided customers with a powerful combination of strategic guidance and world-class technologies. Today’s agreement adds a focus on providing differentiated solutions for multicloud infrastructure and management, digital workspace services, managed applications, resiliency and security, and network and edge computing.

“We’re excited to embark on this journey with VMware and intend to leverage a rich and productive history of joint solution architectures, common designs, and deep relationships to provide customers the solutions, services and support they need to achieve their business transformation goals,” said Stephen Leonard, global alliances and partnerships leader, Kyndryl. “Through this important partnership, Kyndryl and VMware will help companies design and deploy mission-critical workloads that can modernize their applications and operations to reap the benefits of cloud and multi-cloud computing.”

Kyndryl also plans to work with VMware to expand its existing multicloud advisory, implementation, and management services to support the VMware Tanzu platform and deploy vSphere workloads to VMware multi-cloud infrastructure running in all public clouds.

“Multi-cloud is the digital business model for the next 20 years. With the average organization running hundreds of apps across many different clouds, customers need solutions and strategic partners that enable their organizations to be as agile and resilient as possible. This is the power of the VMware and Kyndryl partnership,” said Susan Nash, senior vice president, strategic corporate alliances, VMware. “Kyndryl is a strategic partner that brings world-class solutions, skills, expertise, and experience to the companies’ mutual customers. Together, we will empower customers to achieve smarter paths to cloud, edge, and app modernization, provide autonomy for developers, and enable a more secure, frictionless distributed workforce.”

To further the global reach and impact of their collaboration, Kyndryl and VMware have established local, regional, and worldwide alignment of their respective capabilities, expertise and resources that will facilitate solutions planning, investment, and execution.

Kyndryl and VMware also are jointly developing innovations through a Joint Innovation Lab (JIL), which spearheads and drives delivery model innovations to better reach and serve customers. The JIL programs will further focus on developing solutions for app modernization, containers, observability and security with VMware Tanzu, as well as multicloud management solutions. Kyndryl and VMware will closely align and optimize their collaboration in support of VMware Cross-Cloud™ services to provide infrastructure and applications services and support to customers, independent of the underlying cloud provider environments.