VMware and Amazon partner to bring VMware's infrastructure software to AWS starting in 2017
It's been an open secret that Amazon's AWS division and VMware were going to announce a partnership at a press conference in San Francisco later today. Thanks to VMware mistakenly posting its announcement early …
Context & Ripple Effects
The announcement confirms what an early VMware post leaked ahead of the San Francisco press conference: after years of positioning vSphere as the alternative to public cloud, VMware is putting its stack on AWS itself, with general availability set for 2017. Within weeks, AWS formalized the relationship in an integrated partner program, signaling this is a product line, not a one-off demo.
The arc since has validated the bet: the integration went live at VMworld in August 2017, and by 2018 the pair had extended VMware Cloud on AWS to European customers. The strategic significance is that AWS — which spent a decade asking enterprises to rewrite apps for the cloud — is now hosting them as-is.
First-order effects
- Enterprises with large VMware estates get a lift-and-shift path onto AWS without re-architecting applications, removing the biggest practical barrier that kept those workloads in private data centers.
- AWS gains access to the enterprise accounts where it historically lost to on-premises virtualization, while VMware converts its installed base into recurring cloud revenue instead of defending it against cloud migration.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft's response came fast: a reported effort to build tools that ease porting VMware-based apps to Azure, followed by a partnership with Dell letting Azure customers manage operations with VMware's software — Azure conceding that compatibility with VMware, not replacement of it, is how it competes for these workloads.
- VMware emerges as a cloud-neutral layer whose value rises with every hyperscaler courting it, shifting pricing leverage toward VMware in deals with AWS, Microsoft, and any other provider chasing enterprise estates.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry's old 'cloud versus private cloud' framing dissolves: hyperscalers compete to host legacy virtualization rather than displace it, and hypervisor vendors persist as the interoperability tax both sides pay.
- Enterprise cloud adoption increasingly proceeds through partnership structures like this rather than platform lock-in battles, making coexistence — not conversion — the default migration model for incumbent IT estates.
The trend: Hyperscale clouds are shifting from trying to replace enterprise virtualization stacks to hosting them, turning former rivals like VMware into distribution partners.