After 11 years, the VMworld conference has become well-known for attracting movers and shakers across the whole of the technology industry. While VMware’s annual show still focuses on hands-on, technical practitioners and middle management, more upper management folks are coming along to see what’s going on.

“We are seeing more business executives come [to VMworld],” said Robin Matlock (pictured), chief marketing officer at VMware Inc. “They want to know what their teams are exploring; they want to understand vision. And I think VMware’s value proposition to enterprises is growing and … starting to be more of a business conversation.”

Matlock spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. In addition to how VMworld has grown and changed over the years, they spoke about VMware’s surprising, expanded partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc. (* Disclosure below.)

Blurring the line between public vs. private clouds

While VMware’s partnership with AWS is unprecedented, kicking off this time last year with the initial availability of VMware Cloud on AWS, it is not the sole element of VMware’s cloud strategy. Yet Matlock sees it as a “big pillar” of the company’s cloud strategy. By understanding the vision for how VMware can deliver a bridge to the public cloud, it gives customers the license, comfort and confidence to continue to invest in their technology, whether it’s in their data center or in their public cloud, she explained.

This week’s surprising announcement that AWS is bringing its Relational Database Service, or RDS, to VMware underscores that strategy. This move now elevates the conversation about public cloud services running on-premises. As such, the line between public and private clouds and the line between on-prem and off-prem is fading and blurring, according to Matlock.

Matlock believes the industry will reach a point where the discussion is just a client saying, “What’s the workload, and what’s a service I need to deliver the workload?” And, then, “Can I consume those services in different ways? And what’s the right way to consume those services?”

“I think that’s going be in the best interest of customers, because I think it’s going to really boil down to what is the workload of the services I need and I have a lot of options of how to consume,” Matlock concluded.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE