Industry analysts had no shortage of opinions at this week’s VMworld event in Las Vegas. Some new partnership announcements were major and gathered well-deserved attention; others fell flat. There was plenty of energy, fueled by a large number of new attendees, but fierce competition in the cloud space will bring added pressure next year to release new tools and services. And VMware Inc. has clearly delivered a message that it intends to provide its customers with the benefits of cloud computing, without having to retool the entire information technology operation.

“This year, VMware stopped apologizing for existing and embraced itself,” said Justin Warren (@jpwarren, pictured, second from left), chief analyst at PivotNine Pty Ltd. and guest host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio.

Warren provided his independent perspective about this year’s VMworld 2017 along with theCUBE host Stu Miniman (@stu) and guest hosts John Troyer (@jtroyer,second from right), chief reckoner at TechReckoning, and Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor, left), principal at The CTO Advisor. They discussed announcements involving Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google Cloud, the new VMware Foundation and competitive battles that may lie ahead. (* Disclosure below.)

AWS deal predicted to propel VMware

Monday’s announcement of VMware’s general availability on Amazon Web Services Inc. was seen in a positive light, a well-received move to give customers a hybrid cloud solution. “VMware Cloud on AWS is the big story,” said Troyer, who predicted that AWS would become the largest VMware hoster within two years. “A lot of workload will shift into the AWS service through VMware.”

On the flip side, Tuesday’s news that Pivotal Software and Google Cloud would partner with VMware on production-ready Kubernetes did not excite some of the analysts. “The announcement on Tuesday sort of fell a little flat for me,” Warren said. “The developer community, that’s not this community. This is much more about infrastructure people.”

There was also major news this week involving a new VMware Cloud Foundation. The new foundation is designed for cloud-native apps to run on-premises and can be distributed among public clouds. “I love the message for VCF,” Townsend said. “I’m going to get that consistent OpenStack, what should have been OpenStack, filling across cloud providers.”

Looking ahead to next year’s show, some analysts predicted that VMware’s moves this week to embrace the cloud could result in more of a battle with competitors, such as Red Hat Inc. “It seems like VMware and Red Hat are throwing down against each other,” Troyer said. “So next year we might be talking about the Dell Technologies and Red Hat wars in the cloud.”

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