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VMware execs shake fists at Amazon Web Services cloud

'How can we be losing to a jumped-up bookseller?'

VMware executives have lashed out at Amazon Web Services, warning partners that if they let workloads go to the cloud, they are unlikely to come back.

In a high-octane speech at the virtualization giant's worldwide partner conference, VMware chief Pat Gelsinger warned attendees of the threat posed by Bezos's cloud.

"If a workload goes to Amazon, you lose, and we have lost forever," Gelsinger said, according to Steven Burke of CRN.

"We want to own corporate workload. ... we all lose if they end up in these commodity public clouds. We want to extend our franchise from the private cloud into the public cloud and uniquely enable our customers with the benefits of both. Own the corporate workload now and forever."

Later on, VMware's chief operating officer Carl Eschenbach asks his audience how they cannot "collectively beat a company that sells books."

Amazon Web Services seemed fairly unruffled by the events, with the cloud company's de facto leader Werner Vogels saying "as long as people see us as a bookstore, we are fine" to Juniper Networks' chief security architect via Twitter.

For more VMware teeth-gnashing hop on over to CRN.

VMware's situation sounds disturbingly like the plot of Werner Herzog's Aguirre: The Wrath of God – a film that portrays the crack-up of a band of old world Spanish conquistadors as they journey into the heart of the Amazon rainforest searching for El Dorado, the lost city of gold.

VMware and other enterprise IT giants look to be in much the same position, as they make tentative forays into a cloud computing market defined by a competitor that comes from a different culture, with different values, and which does not want to be colonized. ®

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