Remember the traditional enterprises that were wary to take the journey to cloud? Many are regretting their caution as they hustle to transform under the pressure of the pandemic.

“We’re starting to see some of those more traditional enterprises realize it’s a business imperative for them to have a big cloud strategy and to move there quickly,” said Matt Garman (pictured, right), vice president of AWS sales and marketing at Amazon Web Services Inc.

Garman and Sanjay Poonen (pictured, left), chief operating officer of VMware Inc., spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed the strength of VMware and AWS’ partnership and how the companies are jointly engineering solutions to solve customers’ cloud computing needs. (* Disclosure below.)

Evolving AWS-VMware partnership

AWS’ partnership with VMware enables companies to move on-premises applications into the cloud simply, according to Poonen.

“Being able to take VMware Cloud … and put that into the bare-metal capabilities of AWS and engineer it deep into the stack and all the services … allows that application that’s sitting on-premise to move like a house on wheels to AWS, and that’s a beautiful experience,” he said.

It’s not just about moving existing applications into the cloud. Modernization, either before or after the move, is important to be able to benefit from advances such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, the internet of things, and data services, according to Garman.

“[Customers] want to take all the benefits they’ve gotten from the VMware environment and then add some of the innovations from AWS,” he said.

This is no problem, thanks to the focus of the companies’ joint engineering teams, who have worked to make integrating any of the 200-plus services offered by AWS a simple task.

“Customers continue to get more excited when they see how easy it is to move and operate their vSphere workloads inside of AWS,” Garman said.

Everyone is building on top of Amazon

It’s not just mega-corporations that benefit. Amazon’s global data centers bring global expansion within the reach of both large and small companies. Instead of having to invest in costly infrastructure overseas, companies “just spin up another stack and they’re able to serve their customers globally,” Garman said. “It’s just API calls.”

Government agencies and regulated industries worldwide have joined the move to the AWS cloud, making customer use-case examples plentiful in every sector and industry. Many will be sharing their experiences during the virtual re:Invent event.

“This is not a marketing conference; this is a learning conference,” Garman said. He encouraged anyone with an interest in cloud to attend and take a deep dive into topics that interest them. “We have a ton of customers giving talks,” he said. “And learning from other customers is the best way to understand how you can get the most value out of the cloud.”

“It’s all about customer success,” Poonen stated when asked about the core goal of the partnership. “It’s rooted in a clear understanding that there’s value to customers. This is the best of the public cloud and the public cloud in a hybrid cloud journey. AWS and VMware is the best place to run those vSphere workloads in the cloud.”

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