VMware hopes to halt Amazon’s advance on its data center turf by taking the fight to the public cloud with vCloud Hybrid Service, an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering that has the advantage of being fully interoperable with existing deployments of its hypervisor. On the heels of launching the product in Europe, the virtualization giant appointed former AWS senior evangelist Simone Brunozzi to spearhead the campaign against his former employer.

As vice president and chief technologist for hybrid cloud, Bruzzoni will focus on fostering “relationships with key clients and partners, [and] being the “face” of vCHS at conferences, product strategy and roadmap,” according to his LinkedIn profile. He had similar responsibilities during his tenure at Amazon, which he joined in 2008 after a stint as the project lead on UbuntuSemplice.org, a now-defunct “collaborative effort to build a knowledge base for Linux Ubuntu systems” that resulted in the publication of two guides on the operating system.

Before that, Bruzzoni served as the CTO of an Italian university where he had previously worked as a lecturer. In a post on the VMware blog, he wrote that his newest gig presented a change of pace and the opportunity to play a central role in an ambitious effort to deliver new technologies.

“The position I was offered – Vice President and Chief Technologist, Hybrid Cloud – is both a challenge and an opportunity for me: new types of customers (more enterprise, less SMBs and startups), different ways to adopt and buy services, different barriers and incentives at play, and ultimately different players in the game. It’s an opportunity to learn many new things, and try to prove myself again,” Bruzzoni wrote. His appointment marks an important milestone in VMware’s journey to reposition for the trends threatening to disrupt its traditional revenue streams.

photo: Simone Bruzzoni