By Poaching A Top Sales Exec From VMware, Amazon Gets Even More Serious About The $131 Billion Enterprise Cloud Market

But there's new evidence that it is getting ready grab more of the $131 billion cloud market it created and already dominates.

It just hired Mike Clayville away from VMware to become Vice President of Worldwide Commercial Sales at Amazon Web Services (AWS), as spotted by Network World's Brandon Butler.

In typical Amazon style, Clayville's updated LinkedIn profile says nothing about the new job or the Commercial Sales unit.

But according to an Amazon job posting, the Commercial Sales unit is a "a new business within Amazon Web Services" that is "focused on increasing adoption of Amazon Web Services in the Fortune 2000/mid-market segment."

Clayville was VMware former VP of North American Sales who, a year ago, became a vice president of VMware's Cloud Infrastructure Offerings. VMware is pushing into cloud in a whole bunch of ways. It is already one of the leading providers of software for so-called "private clouds" where companies use cloud tech in their own data centers. It recently launched a direct Amazon public cloud competitor, too.

As we previously reported, since 2011, Amazon has added 200 enterprise sales reps, 40 of those hired in the past year alone, according to exclusive research done for Business Insider by The Lions, a startup whose technology analyzes sales positions based on LinkedIn.

Hiring Clayville is more evidence that Amazon is ramping up an experienced enterprise sales team to go after big enterprise customers. Amazon may even be considering going head-to-head with VMware for the part of cloud business that VMware dominates: "private clouds." That's where companies use cloud tech in their own private datacenters.

Amazon is duking it out with IBM for a chance to build its first-ever private cloud for the CIA on a contract worth up to $600 million. With an enterprise salesforce, the largest public cloud and its own private cloud tech, Amazon could be unstoppable.