VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services was launched at VMworld 2017. Since then, the partnership between VMware Inc. and AWS has helped to bring cloud model on-premises for businesses that have latency or local data processing constraints but still want automated infrastructure lifecycle management.

So how is the partnership going? While some were skeptical initially, a few years later it’s never been stronger, according to Mark Lohmeyer (pictured, right), senior vice president and general manager of cloud services at VMware Inc., and Dave Brown (pictured, left), vice president of elastic compute cloud, EC2, at AWS.

Lohmeyer and Brown spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed the VMware and AWS partnership and trends in what businesses are demanding. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following has been condensed for clarity.]

EC2 is the core building block of AWS. It’s even more accelerated with the pandemic. Give us the update on the partnership. 

Lohmeyer: The partnership has never been stronger. We announced the partnership and delivered the initial service three years ago, and I think since then both companies have really been focused on innovating rapidly on behalf of our customers — bringing together the best of the VMware portfolio and the best of the entire AWS set of capabilities. And so we’ve been incredibly pleased to be able to deliver that value to our joint customers, and we look forward to continue to work very closely together.

It’s just been great synergy. Dave, I want to get your thoughts. What’s your perspective on all of this? 

Brown: We have many customers who use VMware in their own environments; they’ve been using it for years and years. And when they move to AWS, they very often want to use those tools. So we partner with many, many companies, and so it’s a high priority for us. The VMware partnership, I think, has been sort of the role model for us in terms of setting our sights on a goal back in 2016 and then continuing to innovate on features over the last three years.

[VMware] has been very successful as a company with IT operations, and now you’re moving into the cloud. Can you share your thoughts on how VMware Cloud on AWS takes that next level for your customers? 

Lohmeyer: Every company is on a journey to transform the level of capability they’re able to offer to their customers and to their employees, right? And a big part of that is how do they modernize their application development, how do they deliver new applications and services? [COVID] has only accelerated the need for customers to be able to continue to go down that path. And so between VMware and AWS, we’re looking to provide those customers a platform that allows them to accelerate their path to application modernization and new services and capabilities.

So if you think about accelerating that journey, being able to rapidly migrate those VMware-based workloads into the AWS cloud, when you’re in the AWS cloud being able to modernize that environment using the [VMware Tanzu Portfolio] and then the infrastructure that needs to come together to make that possible, we’re trying to accelerate our delivery of those capabilities so that we can help our customers accelerate the delivery of the application value to their customers.

Dave, what trends do you see from the EC2 perspective that you could share?

Brown: We definitely see the acceleration in customers looking to utilize VMware on AWS. There was a lot of interest early on. Really over the last year, I think we’ve seen over 140% growth in the service. As the customers grow, the demand for features of VMware on AWS has grown, and we’ve put out a number of features to support customers at really, really large scale.

So I think the key message is, if you have a VMware installation today and you’re thinking about moving to the cloud, there’s very little that needs to stop you in starting to move. It is very simple to set up and very little you have to do to your application stack to actually move it over.

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