VMware Inc. has long leveraged a vast partner ecosystem to help bill itself as the common operating environment for many different technologies. The addition of two heavy hitters — Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google Cloud Platform — is rocking the boat for both partners and customers.

“There is a lot of historical legacy, and many of our relationships are very strong, and I think those are going to continue to be very strong,” said Robin Matlock (pictured), chief marketing officer at VMware. “But you’re seeing a lot of new brands step in.”

Matlock spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during today’s VMworld event in Las Vegas, Nevada. (* Disclosure below.)

The word in the halls at VMworld is that veteran VMware partners find AWS’ and Google’s presence in the ecosystem threatening. It’s also likely that AWS and Google themselves may find VMware a bit cramped for the two of them. “Sure they’re going to compete, and they’re going to compete fairly, and they’re going to try to win in the market,” Matlock said. But VMware will maintain a position of relative neutrality, she added.

“We were advocating hybrid cloud long, long ago. What we’re all about is creating a common operating environment that lets you run, manage, connect and secure workloads on any cloud,” Matlock said.

Selling the chief information officer

VMware’s main loyalty is to its large base of enterprise customers, according to Matlock. “Our job is to let customers decide which of those clouds make sense for their business and ensure they have a common operating environment,” she said.

In other words, VMware is moving at the pace of the CIO [chief information officer], right? “I would argue that the CIO probably needs to pick up the pace of it, because he’s got to move — or she — at the speed of business,” Matlock concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE