Dive Brief:

• VMware and Amazon Web Services announced Thursday they will partner to build a new integrated hybrid cloud offering.
• As part of the new alliance, AWS will be VMware’s primary public cloud infrastructure partner and VMware, in turn, will serve as AWS’s primary private cloud partner.
• "The goal of the partnership is to make it easier for customers to run applications in a consistent hybrid environment using a common set of software and tools," Mark Lohmeyer, vice president of Products for the Cloud Platform Business Unit at VMware, wrote in a company blog.​

Dive Insight:

Rumors of a partnership between the former rivals surfaced last week. The formal announcement proves the companies have indeed moved on from their previous conflict and realized the potential of tapping into each other’s market shares.

"This new service will make it easier for customers to preserve their investment in existing applications and processes while taking advantage of the global footprint, advanced capabilities and scale of the AWS public cloud," said VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger in a statement. 

VMware has recently formed a slew of partnerships that allows it to run its software on its own servers and the infrastructure of other cloud providers. The partnership should also help Amazon advance in the hybrid cloud market, a space where it has struggled.

"Most enterprises are already virtualized using VMware, and now with VMware Cloud on AWS, for the first time, it will be easy for customers to operate a consistent and seamless hybrid IT environment using their existing VMware tools on AWS, and without having to purchase custom hardware, rewrite their applications or modify their operating model," said Andy Jassy, CEO, AWS in an announcement. 

Invite-only betas are expected to start in the beginning of 2017 with general availability expected in mid-2017.