The demand for hybrid and multicloud computing infrastructure is forcing companies to learn to collaborate and cooperate rather than just compete — which is something VMware Inc. is doing by partnering with Amazon Web Services, Inc.

“People don’t move and change things just because it’s convenient,” said Ajay Patel (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of cloud provider software at VMware. “There has to be eventually business value, and if something is already working, you just don’t go rewrite it.”

Patel 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 VMware’s partnership with AWS and the future competition for cloud providers. (* Disclosure below.)

Collaboration, cooperation and competition

VMware and AWS have a strong partnership, and they are both looking to the future to see what the enterprise demands for cloud options and how to best collaborate to move solutions forward.

“Fundamentally, VMware is all about customer choice, and it’s about ecosystem,” Patel said. “For us, it’s about being that ubiquitous digital platform, and the more we can turn on these partners to leverage us and make it easy for our customers to operate in a multicloud world, that’s where the landscape is.”

As everyone re-thinks their business models to move forward, Patel predicts certain areas where competition will be fierce — including the middleware area of security management and resource management. The cloud service provider will change from an asset-heavy data center host to a managed services partner using their own assets and third-party assets to add value to a customer.

“The battleground for me is going to be around who owns that control play that defines where workloads land, and the infrastructure is gonna be very competitive,” Patel said. “As you move into the policy layer more and more, these kind of shared services that control across cloud become invaluable, and so I think that’s where the interesting marketplace is gonna go.”

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