Even though VMware initially called its Amazon competitor vCloud Hybrid Services, make no mistake, it's the company's public cloud (now renamed vCloud Air.)

And, [company]VMware[/company] really wants workloads that might run ow on [company]Amazon[/company] Web Services to come on over, says Bill Fathers, EVP and GM of cloud services for VMware.  That's a tall order. Face it, AWS has been around as, an old boss would have said "Hector was a pup" The first services launched in 2006, and vCloud Air is, what?? a old toddler of two. Fathers acknowledged vCloud Air doesn't have thousands of customers  but said that wasn't the plan. Instead VMware wants a few hundred of key companies to act as bellwethers.

But Fathers point is that a small percentage of total computing is now running on any public cloud -- he thinks it's now 5 or 10 percent up from the two to three percent he thought it was last June at Structure. Which means that there's a ton of work up for grabs.

And while AWS looks to be the enemy for VMware's cloud, the same is not true for Google -- VMware last week announced plans to offer and support four Google services including BigQuery, on vCloud Air.  This week it brought out its promised Integrated OpenStack. 

Fathers positions both the Google relationship and this week's Partner Exchange announcements. And he's clearly not backing away from a fight with the biggest of big clouds.

Bill Fathers, VMware EVP and GM cloud services

Beyond the VMware universe there was a bit of big data moving and shaking with Cloudera buying Explain.io and its self-service query modeling expertise and Datastax picking up Aurelius, the keeper of the Titan graph database. Could this be a sign of even more M&A to come? That's something we'll hear more about at Structure Data from March 18-19 in New York from the CEOs of Cloudera, Hortonworks and other data powerhouses, so book your tickets now.

Ok, the gratuitous plug is now done, it's time to listen.

pod

Vaughn DiMarco