Public-cloud and on-premises infrastructure vendors have proselytized very different gospels to customers. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that vendors can be biased and profit-driven. Now many customers are signaling that they’ll be resolutely hybrid for the foreseeable future. This is forcing vendors on both sides of the cloud aisle to think differently.

“The battlefield now is all about hybrid; it’s no longer about private or public,” said Ajay Patel (pictured, left), senior vice president and general manager of product development, cloud services, at VMware Inc. “Even [Amazon Web Services Inc.] has finally recognized the world is hybrid with their Outposts announcement.”

Vendors are now positioning themselves on the bridge between public and private cloud. Customers need to fit applications in the best-suited environment; they also need an operating model that doesn’t stretch them too thin.

Patel and Prashanth Chandrasekar (pictured, right), senior vice president and general manager of managed public clouds at Rackspace Inc., spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren), chief analyst at PivotNine Pty Ltd, during AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. They discussed how VMware and Rackspace are helping customers smooth the transition to hybrid cloud. (* Disclosure below.)

Open options close the deal

Partners VMware and Rackspace approach hybrid cloud from different angles, but embrace the same philosophy.

“We come from it from a technology services angle, because we’re a service company at heart,” Chandrasekar said. VMware, on the other hand, is a phenomenal technology platform company, he added. Both believe that today “multicloud” is a journey, a work in progress, and customers need to keep their options open.

Rackspace takes customers through a deep assessment of workloads upfront. It strives for neutrality in selecting infrastructure — like Amazon, or VMware on Amazon, or Rackspace’s VMware private cloud as a service for data centers.

“Then we go through the process of architecting and deploying based on best practices — that we gain from, by the way, thousands of these customers that we’ve actually moved — and then actually managing and operating these environments,” Chandrasekar stated.

To help manage and operate hybrid environments, Rackspace just announced next-gen cloud services, including Service Blocks, which allow customers to mix and match custom-built cloud solutions as their needs change.

“So we could say, ‘Let’s focus just on architecting, deploying and migrating apps, and that’s it,'” Chandrasekar said. Or, at some point, customers may want Rackspace to manage their entire hybrid IT environment, he added.

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: Rackspace Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Rackspace nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE