VMware's top management vented at Amazon last week during the company's annual Partner Exchange conference in Las Vegas, telling the audience that they're all doomed if the corporate world moves to Amazon's infrastructure.

"We want to own the corporate workload," CEO Pat Gelsinger said at the event. "We all lose if they end up in these commodity public clouds. We want to extend our franchise from the private cloud into the public cloud and uniquely enable our customers with the benefits of both. Own the corporate workload now and forever."

COO Carl Eschenbach told the resellers that he found it "really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books."

Well, for a mere bookseller the Amazon cloud is thought to have grossed $2 billion last year, with outside projections anticipating $3.8 billion in revenues this year. And it sounds like VMware is getting killed by the public cloud price war.

CRN, however, thinks VMware's wall of worry is camouflage for a completely VMware-owned public cloud where customers can move their private cloud workloads. If true, it means that VMware has abandoned its reliance on third-party clouds because they aren't taking share from the great Amazon goliath.

The book also heard that the widgetry, called bluntly VMware Public Cloud, was in beta and means to slow Amazon's momentum not to mention make money VMware's not making from virtualization.

Apparently users will have to use VMware technologies like Nicira, DynamicOps and vCenter Operations for monitoring, security, agility and performance.

It's unclear if a VMware public cloud would be agnostic about hypervisors or interoperable with other clouds. The alternative is to continue its vendor lock-in. And Forrester analyst James Staten, who believes that Gelsinger tried to demonize Amazon, said in a blog that "A cloud-washed vSphere environment that takes two days to deploy new workloads, fulfilling requests through the help desk and having no cost transparency will lose every day to a public cloud."