Great Q&A with Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware and Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS Cloud Services

Great Executive Q & A with Pat Gelsinger CEO of VMware, Andy Jassy CEO of AWS Cloud Services and Sanjay Poonen COO of VMware 

Question from press core: "In the General Session, VMware's strategy was consistent infrastructure and operations, what does VMware mean by the term consistent infrastructure?"

Pat "There are 4400 VMware's vCloud Air Network "vCAN" partners providing Public Cloud Services to our customers. With the AWS partnership, customers can extend services to Amazon. This is all done leveraging VMware's management tools. It is this consistent infrastructure and operations that we were discussing in the general session. In addition we are developing other cloud services but these are likely to come to market as 'bit size' services to solve a particular challenge. We believe this approach makes it easier for customers to adopt."

Michael "VMware has 500,000 customers that the services being developed by VMware are directly applicable to which is a huge portion of the market." 

Question from Paul O'Doherty @podoherty. Public Cloud gets sticky with server less architecture while VMware is really focused on the infrastructure; are you discussing other areas where  VMware can add value to an Amazon and can you elaborate?

Pat "Well what we have announced today is a very big achievement but it really has kicked off an extensive collaboration involving a huge portion of the engineering talent at Amazon and VMware. While it would be premature to talk about anything at this point, we expect today's announcement to be one of many moving forward with Amazon."

Question from press core: "If in the new Cloud economy it is all about the apps, then it would seem that the partnership favours Amazon over the long term; can you comment?"

Pat "At VMware we do not see it that way. This is an opportunity for VMware to continue to add value as a part of a strong and ongoing partnership. When you think about moving applications to the cloud, often this involves some heavy engineering. Refactoring or Re-platforming an application, if it is not essentially changing does not add a significant amount of value. This set of services announced today adds a lot of value to our customers. Today VMware is providing management and metrics to applications but this is also the start of a joint roadmap with many more products and announcements that will be more app orientated"

Question from press core: "What is the benefit from the partnership from Amazons perspective?"

Andy: "Everything that we decided to pursue was not lightly considered. What carries the day is what customers want from us. When we look at the adoption of Public Cloud, enterprise is still at the relative beginning of their journey with some notable exceptions. Most are in the early days of their journey. When we spoke to customers about their Cloud Strategy we were asked "Why are you not working with VMware?" It really was the impetuous for these discussions. Customer feedback and excitement is tremendous around this partnership."

Question from press core: "As customers are heavily penalized for egress traffic from Public Cloud, are there any concerns that this on-boarding tends to flow one way around the VMware and Amazon partnership?"

Andy: "For customers who are serious about the adoption of a hybrid cloud platform, while egress traffic is a consideration, it is not a roadblock in the adoption."

Pat:"I do see customers also approaching architecture a little differently. For example now they have to build for average and peak load in a single environment. With a true hybrid platform it is possible to build for average workload while leveraging AWS for peak capacity demand"