This year marks the 30th anniversary of the reopening of free crossing between East and West Berlin, triggering the removal of the infamous Berlin Wall and igniting a thaw in the Cold War across Eastern Europe. Another wall of sorts came down today for enterprise customers of both Microsoft Corp. and VMware Inc.

The two companies jointly announced a partnership that will allow VMware’s core products to be available on the Microsoft Azure platform. The news follows a period where both companies competed against each other in the enterprise-class hypervisor arena.

“The big picture is combining Workspace ONE with Enterprise Mobility + Security to allow Office 365 customers to get conditional access,” said Sanjay Poonen (pictured), chief operating officer of VMware. “I call it these ‘Berlin Wall’ moments. That’s a game changer.”

Poonen spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Dell Tech World event in Las Vegas. They discussed VMware’s competitive position in the multicloud ecosystem and recent acquisitions that have furthered the company’s business strategy in several areas, including the Kubernetes container orchestration system (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Competition with Red Hat

The latest news from VMware offered further insight into the company’s push to solidify its position as the top infrastructure provider. Meeting enterprise needs in a multicloud world means providing solutions in both public cloud and on-premises, something that another VMware competitor, Red Hat Inc., appeared poised to dominate on its own.

Although VMware’s chief operating officer praised his company’s own partnership with IBM, which acquired Red Hat in October, he offered a different view of Red Hat’s potential competitive influence in the multicloud arena.

“Who else can do multicloud better than VMware?” Poonen asked. “Maybe the only company that could have done that was Red Hat. Not so much now inside IBM.”

VMware has made several recent acquisitions over the past two years, including VeloCloud Networks Inc., a cloud-delivered SD-WAN provider, and CloudHealth Technologies Inc., which provided visibility across cloud and on-prem infrastructure.

The company also purchased the Kubernetes-focused Heptio Inc. in December, which has moved VMware deeper into the container space.

“We’ve become now one of the top two or three contributors to Kubernetes,” Poonen noted. “Our goal is to make containerware come to you from the company that made virtual machines possible with VMware.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Tech World 2019 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dell Technologies World. Neither the sponsors of select segments of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE