For the past few years, companies debated between private and public cloud computing. Then hybrid and multicloud options started to help merge these competing forces, bringing more options to organizations that didn’t want to force a choice.

And now? With landmark collaborations between companies like Amazon Web Services Inc. and VMware Inc., the cloud is back to being one data center with a large edge, according to Mark Lohmeyer (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of cloud at VMware.

“The distinction between private cloud and public cloud has completely gone away,” Lohmeyer said.

Lohmeyer spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. They discussed AWS and VMware’s continuing partnership, and future predictions for the cloud market. (* Disclosure below.)

Merging clouds

AWS and VMware have been partnering since 2016 when they launched VMware Cloud on AWS to help businesses protect their VMware environments on the AWS public cloud. They have since gone on to launch Amazon Relational Database Service on VMware, which helps customers deploy managed databases in on-premises VMware environments. Most recently is the launch of AWS Outposts, which will officially allow AWS infrastructure to be run on-preme.

AWS Outposts comes in two variants. One is VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts, which gives customers the full cloud experience in their data center. “We think this is going to be transformative for the data center,” Lohmeyer said.  “You think about being able to get the data center operators out of having to worry about the lifecycle of either the hardware or the VMware software on top. It’s gonna be huge.”

The second variant of AWS Outposts is VMware Cloud Foundation for EC2, which will help customers who’ve built their applications on top of native EC2 now extend their applications into the data center to the edge.

“What we’ve done with VMware Cloud Foundation for EC2 on Outposts is brought those VMware enterprise class capabilities around networking and security and storage to that environment,” Lohmeyer said.

This has, in a very real sense, given customers the options to have one cloud once more, and it’s going to lead to a level playing field for newer companies to invest in platform capabilities that might’ve been hard before, Lohmeyer explained. “So far, from customers and analysts I’ve talked to, it’s resonating really strongly. We’re really looking forward over the next year to executing and delivering this,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: VMware Inc., sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither VMware nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE