The march to public cloud is hitting some speed bumps. Companies are learning the hard way that some apps belong at home for convenience, cost, compliance and other reasons. This is where on-premises vendors can come up the side and snatch some of Amazon Web Services Inc.’s customers.

Or not.

There’s a movement afoot to fuse cloud with on-premises on a deep level, and AWS just joined in a big way. With Outposts, it’s planting a veritable AWS cloud twin smack in customers’ data centers. Which on-prem infrastructure vendors need to be worried? The real question is: Which don’t?

“Clearly Dell EMC is threatened by this; HPE; Nutanix; the VxRack guys; Lenovo’s in there,” said Dave Vellante, co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. “Are they wiped out? No. But they have to respond.”

Vellante spoke with co-hosts John Furrier, James Kobielus and David Floyer during AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. They discussed Outposts, additional AWS announcements and their potential market impact.

On-prem cloud market’s getting rough and rowdy

AWS Outposts will deliver the same services and application program interfaces that users access in its public cloud. It will stretch AWS’ arm far into new market territory, according to Floyer. It will start rolling out in beta in early 2019.

Not long ago, AWS was a hybrid denier, insisting that all workloads were better off in public cloud, Vellante pointed out. This left a space in the market for other vendors to cater to on-prem diehards or hybrid customers.

“That’s all changed,” Vellante said. “They’re making it much, much more difficult for what they call the old guard to compete.”

But it’s not impossible. Competitors now must make their on-prem offerings as much like public cloud as humanly possible.

“They have to have self service; they have to have utility pricing; they have to connect to the cloud,” Vellante said. They can make AWS or Microsoft Corp.’s Azure Cloud a partner and connect to them, for example. “These guys don’t just give up. They’re hard competitors. They’re fighters.”

AWS also debuted new technologies for artificial intelligence, machine learning and satellites as a service at the show.

Here’s the complete video analysis, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s extensive coverage of AWS re:Invent.

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE