After first announcing a partnership with VMware Inc. in late 2016, Amazon Web Services Inc. made a surprise announcement at the start of VMworld that it would bring its Relational Database Service to VMware. Initial reaction from customers has been incredibly positive, according to Sandy Carter (pictured), vice president of AWS.

“We’ve been hearing from customers about the hybrid cloud and how that’s a great on-ramp — how customers are starting with hybrid cloud or going to the public cloud,” Carter said. “And so as we were listening to our customers, one of the biggest items they were interested in is how do I manage my database. Databases are hard, and you need great security. This is really a natural progression.”

Carter spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer) during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed the RDS announcement and how the AWS/VMware partnership has developed since 2016. (* Disclosure below.)

Culture within a new partnership

AWS’ focus is to think about the customer and doing right by them, which in turn means thinking outside the box, according to Carter. As an example of innovative thinking, Carter mentioned a startup AWS is working with. “It’s got IoT in it, back end by AWS, and you can press a safety ring … if you get in trouble,” she said. Then the device calls the police or someone else to come and help.

“Just doing little things like that makes all the difference in the world,” Carter explained.

In addition to doing right by customers, AWS and VMware are making sure their employees are comfortable with the changes happening as a result of their partnership. Therefore, the two companies are working to unite the two teams to make them stronger, according to Carter.

“AWS has such a strong developer advocacy community, and VMware has a strong administration community. So, one of the things we’ve been working on with VMware is creating an admin community who understands the AWS, and AWS who understands the admin,” Carter said.

The result has been a stronger, more adept team that works to meet their customers’ goals, Carter concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld conference. (* Disclosure: VMware Inc. sponsored coverage of VMworld, and some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. Sponsors have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE