At VMware’s partner conference last month, CEO Pat Gelsinger said in a private question-and-answer session that his company is developing a way to move workloads back and forth between its vCloud Air public cloud and Amazon Web Services, according to partners who were there.

This would be significant for a number of reasons, but mainly because moving workloads between different clouds is a notoriously slow and tedious process, one that involves converting virtual machines between different formats and accounting for their networking and storage configurations, among other challenges.

Eric Hartley, president of Bluetowne, a Mount Pleasant, S.C.-based consulting firm that partners with VMware and other enterprise vendors, said being able to move workloads between clouds is an important part of his company’s future strategy.

“It looks like all the big vendors are cozying up to one another. They know over the next 10 years or so, regardless of consolidation, that they will all need to play well together in the data center,” Hartley said.

Read the full CRN article (featuring a quote by Bluetowne’s own Eric Hartley) here.