There’s a tug of war over the enterprise cloud. On one side is VMware with its licensed, private cloud offering, and on the other is Amazon, with its cost-efficient set of public cloud services.

AWS is gaining a lot of traction with corporate users, thanks to a combination of a solid pitch and “rogue IT” – the name given to ad hoc technology workers bring in behind the back of their organization’s IT department. In recent years, the latter turned into a massive (and hugely profitable) trend that encompasses just about everything from mobile phones to IaaS.

In light of this, it’s not surprising that Amazon was the center of discussion at VMware’s Partner Exchange conference last week. Talking to attendees, CEO Pat Gelsinger stated that “if a workload goes to Amazon, you lose, and we have lost together.” COO Carl Eschenbach voiced the same sentiment, saying that “I find it hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books.”

Eschenbach put his money where his mouth is. During a keynote, he outlined his VMware’s plan to stay ahead of its rival by establishing a stronger presence in three core verticals: end user computing, the software-defined data center, and the the hybrid cloud.

The executive disclosed that his company partnered up with Cisco and Dell to deploy its VDI software on their hardware, and said that a new sales force will be assembled to market the new solutions to the channel. He also discussed VMware’s new Cloud Credit program, which offers handsome upfront discounts to partners that resell the virtualization giant’s new vCenter Operation Management technology. The revamped management platform features built-in analytics, automatic troubleshooting, and other abstractions that make admins’ lives a lot easier.

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