VMware Inc.’s evolving partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc. has at times resembled the move of a friend into the home of close acquaintance. First there are a few books, then some furniture and finally both are living wholly under the same roof.

After officially unveiling VMware Cloud on AWS in 2017, obtainable only through VMware, the two companies announced in May that customers could buy the service directly through AWS and the cloud provider’s sizable partner network. In October, VMware moved closer to integrating its empire with the public cloud provider’s by making the Amazon Relational Database Service available for customers running VMware vSphere.

These moves over the past two years are part of VMware’s larger strategy to pivot toward the cloud, but it clearly will take time.

“We at VMware aren’t able to do a complete pivot like Adobe did to say: ‘Burn the boats of on-premises and completely shift everything to software as a service,’” said Sanjay Poonen (pictured, right), chief operating officer of VMware. “Customers still want NSX on-prem; customers still want our [hyperconverged infrastructure] product on-prem; people are still buying vSphere on-prem. We’ve got this more delicate balance of starting to shift an on-prem business to something that’s a blend of on-prem and cloud, while the cloud part grows a lot faster.”

Poonen spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS re:Invent event in Las Vegas. He was joined by Mike Clayville (pictured, left), vice president of worldwide commercial sales and business development at AWS, and they discussed how both companies intend to meet demand for the hybrid cloud and focused customer messaging on jointly offered services. (* Disclosure below.)

Historic level of migration

Motivating both AWS and VMware is strong customer preference for a hybrid model, one that blends the services of cloud with on-premises infrastructure. As AWS has shown with products like Outposts, which enables cloud services inside enterprise data centers, it’s a jackpot that both companies expect to pay off.

“The pundits will tell you that by 2020, 90% of customers will be in a hybrid model,” Clayville said. “Arguably, 2020 will be the year of the most migrations in history if those pundits are correct.”

As Poonen pointed out, migrations are just half of the strategic equation when it comes to VMware’s partnership with AWS.

“We’ve really perfected our message in the course of the last six to 12 months to two M’s: migrate and modernize,” Poonen said. “We can migrate you into this avenue and then modernize with a set of containers and other services.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS re:Invent event. (* Disclosure: VMware Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither VMware nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE