While some are pondering how VMware Inc. is going to stay competitive with so many workloads moving to public cloud, the company is busy making inroads to private cloud and cloud-service vendors. It is working to enable enterprises to build their own clouds on-premises and give cloud-service providers the raw materials they need to deliver managed services.

This is part of the company’s remodeling itself as a platform for cloud builders of all varieties, according to Ajay Patel (pictured, left), senior vice president and general manager of cloud provider software at VMware.

“I’m hoping to the market we’re now becoming a very relevant and strategic platform that spans beyond the traditional VMware data center and hybrid cloud,” he said.

The recently-announced partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc. that brings AWS’ market-leading Relational Database Service on-prem with VMware embodies this versatility. “Customers are seeing the value of delivering cloud — whether public cloud or on-prem — on vSphere,” Patel said.

Patel and Russ Reeder (pictured, right), president and chief executive officer of OVH US LLC, spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed VMware’s multiple-choice tableau for courting private-cloud customers and cloud-service providers. (* Disclosure below.)

Exercising options on- and off-premises

OVH is the poster company for what VMware is selling to cloud-service providers. The company has launched a fully-hosted suite of services for customers built on the full VMware stack, including vSphere, vSAN and NSX virtualized networking.

It also has a public cloud offering built with open-source infrastructure platform OpenStack. Presented with this combo of choices, customers often find that their legacy apps can in fact live in cloud, Reeder explained.

“So that’s where I think customers are saying, ‘Wow, I can actually be more in the cloud than I thought I could,’” he stated.

“The power of VMware is giving them the flexibility to start to leverage cloud without having to make a lot of upfront investment just for change’s sake, but more for the business transformation they’re trying to drive,” Patel 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: OVH US LLC sponsored this segment, with additional broadcast sponsorship from VMware Inc. OVH, VMware, and other sponsors do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE