VMware CEO Paul Maritz took a question about OpenStack from an analyst this week during the company’s earnings call.

His response provides insights into VMware’s views about the open cloud effort and how he sees his company’s efforts in comparison.

Richard G. Sherlund of Nomura Securities asked Maritz about the large enterprise companies that have joined OpenStack including IBM and Red Hat. He specifically referred to Maritz and his discussions about the breadth and depth of its data centers:

…How often does OpenStack come up as a competitive consideration as you’re talking about infrastructure and management and how you might expect that to develop over time?

Maritz responded:

So at this point, we’re certainly aware of OpenStack and aware that there’s a fair amount of interest in it from various parties in the industry, which is not surprising given the importance of this fundamental trend where customers trying to move to operating in a cloud-like manner, both in their internal data centers and the public data centers. So it is highly unlikely that we would be left alone to have that opportunity all to ourselves. That being said, OpenStack at this point compared to the vSphere environment is still relatively immature. We see that more interest in the public cloud space than we do in the private cloud space at this point in time. And we continue to believe that our greater, nearer-term challenge will probably come from Microsoft. But that being said, when we have these large industry transitions, our history teaches us that typically your — in the long term, your toughest competition comes from a new company building on new technology. And for that reason, we certainly take all of the competing cloud technologies very seriously and spend a lot of time thinking about them, analyzing them. And it’s for that reason that we’re constructing the series of investments that we’ll be bringing to market this year and in the subsequent years.

Earlier in the conference call, Maritz reiterated the VMware cloud computing strategy. It’s built on the channel. Overall, VMware has 8,000 partners. New cloud services partners include AT&T, which also recently announced it would develop an open cloud environment built on OpenStack. Others Maritz mentioned: Bluelock, Colt, CSC, Dell, Optus, SingTel, SOFTBANK and Verizon.

What do you think of Maritz statements?