VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger about the rivalry in a recent interview, Gelsinger couldn't help but throw some shade.
"Our vision and strategy is so much more comprehensive than ACI. It's really like comparing a bicycle that's great and wonderful, to a Lamborghini," Gelsinger said. He said that VMware and Cisco have hundreds of customers using both products, and that"we're very happy with that, but don't confuse the Lamborghini with the bicycle."Competitive slam aside, just as Cisco wasn't about to let VMware run away with the nascent networking software market back in 2014, it isn't going to hand over the nascent cloud network software market either.
Cisco, VMware, Amazon and Microsoft are all playing similar games, forming agreements and partnerships with one another's competitors. VMware is now also working with Microsoft on a partnership similar to the one it struck with AWS. Ironically, Microsoft and VMware have also been fierce rivals for most of their corporate lives.When it comes to legacy IT vendors and the cloud wars, the enemy of your enemy is your friend, even if it's also a classic enemy — or even if that enemy used to be a friend.