On Monday, VMware Inc. announced general availability for its customers by going live on the Amazon Web Services Inc. public cloud. On Tuesday, the company released the news that it would partner with Pivotal to provide commercial-grade Kubernetes distributions for both Google Cloud and VMware vSphere. Both announcements illustrate a developing theme this week at VMworld in Las Vegas, Nevada: VMware has a big tent, and it has no problem inviting major cloud providers into it.

“I want to make this tent large for as many players to come here. Our strategy needs to be highly relevant to the power players in the [cloud] ecosystem,” said Sanjay Poonen (pictured),  chief operating officer of customer operations at VMware.

Poonen stopped by the theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with co-hosts John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante) at VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed the size of VMware’s cloud provider ecosystem, the evolution of mobile cloud to cloud edge and the potential to combine future VMworld events with at least one other major company. (* Disclosure below.)

If Poonen means business, he may need a larger tent. VMware already has 4,400 cloud providers that build their stacks on the company’s products, in addition to various deals with the “Big Four” of AWS, Google Cloud, IBM Corp. and Microsoft Azure.

Meeting the needs of all cloud providers

With this kind of customer breadth, VMware can also focus on meeting the needs of “boutique” cloud shops, such as Accenture plc and emerging drone networks, as well as mini-data centers that are beginning to spring up in locations around the world. Mindful of this trend, the company also announced on Monday a re-named VMware Cloud Provider Program, with improvements designed to expand its reach into the full ecosystem.

“Our goal is to make sure we’re pervasive to all of those (providers),” Poonen said. “VMware stack can become the software that powers that whole thing.”

VMware is also keeping a close watch on the evolution of the mobile cloud, whose rise could transform the existing model of massive, central data centers to one that includes smaller edge networks. “The world is going to go from mobile cloud to cloud edge,” Poonen explained. “The whole world of cloud and edge computing is the future.”

The steady stream of new partnership announcements this week raises the possibility that VMware may be interested in holding future events, such as VMworld, together with major cloud providers such as AWS, which will hold one of its major conferences — re:Invent — later this year. “I would love to see the momentum of VMworld and the momentum of re:Invent start coalescing,” Poonen said. “Now we’ve got a collection of 200,000 [people], and we couldn’t have done that on our own.”

VMware’s stock valuation has surged in recent days. Asked about the impact of the various partnership announcements this week on the company’s financial future, Poonen declined to elaborate. “We just want to keep growing, and the market will fairly value us over time,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE