Amazon's major rival, VMware, gives in and brings its own software to Amazon's cloud

VMware will soon announce that is partnering with Amazon to make VMware's software run more easily on Amazon's cloud.

The press conference hasn't taken place yet, but the company accidentally leaked the press release early.

The meat of that announcement is that Vmware will be bringing its flagship software, including VSphere, VSAN, and its Cisco rival, NSX, to Amazon to make it all available to Amazon customers as a could service.

This is a move to protect VMware's dominance in its area of software, which helps servers and networks work more efficiently.

When companies move to the cloud, particularly Amazon's cloud, they get an opportunity to rethink their reliance on VMware's software.

VMware has been countering that by trying to compete with Amazon's cloud directly, selling its own cloud, known as "vCloud Air," VMware has created a network thousands of data center and hosting providers to also offer vCloud Air. The idea being that if you choose vCloud, you aren't trapped with one service provider but have many to choose from. And you can use them in conjunction with running apps and data (aka a "workload") in your own corporate data centers, too.

With this move, VMware is essentially adding the granddaddy of all cloud computing companies as a cloud partner. It's sort of like it created another option to vCloud Air where its customers can link their data centers to Amazon's cloud, instead of to one of its network of service providers.

Here are the relevant bits of the press release.

The Power of VMware on AWS

Currently in Technology Preview, VMware Cloud on AWS, will bring VMware's enterprise class Software-Defined Data Center software to the AWS cloud, and will enable customers to run any application across vSphere-based private, public and hybrid cloud environments. It will be operated, managed and sold by VMware as an on-demand, elastically scalable service and customers will be able to leverage AWS services such as developer tools, analytics, databases, and more.

This jointly architected service represents a significant investment in engineering, operations, support and sales resources from both companies. Designed to deliver a great customer experience, the service will be optimized to run on dedicated AWS infrastructure purpose-built for this offering. It will deliver the power of VMware's SDDC infrastructure software across compute, network, and storage (with vSphere, VSAN, and NSX) while providing access to advanced AWS services, backed by an integrated customer support experience. Invite-only betas are expected to start in the beginning of 2017 with availability expected to be in the mid-2017 time-frame.

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through hispersonal investment company Bezos Expeditions.