The work could make it easier for companies to migrate applications between their data centers and Amazon's server farms and make it easier to recover data from Amazon in case of disasters, The Information said, citing an unnamed source.

Amazon Web Services is thinking about building software for corporate data centers as part of its recently formed partnership with VMware , according to a report on Monday.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has been busy refining on-premises data center software that mirrors that of its Azure public cloud. And Google has taken its first step toward doing more with on-premises data centers through its partnership with Nutanix.

The potential expansion of the VMware partnership, though, wouldn't be the first thing AWS is doing to work with on-premises data centers.

AWS added on-premises support to its CodeDeploy continuous-delivery service in 2015.

AWS introduced the Snowball storage server companies could use to copy data and then ship it to the cloud in 2015.

AWS added on-premises support to its EC2 Run Command tool for running shell scripts on many machines at once in 2016.

AWS unveiled the Snowmobile truck for copying even larger supplies of data and then hauling it off to Amazon in 2016.

This past November AWS released a container image of its Amazon Linux server operating system for use on corporate servers.

Amazon and VMware announced their partnership in October, targeting a mid-2017 launch for VMware virtualization software running atop the Amazon cloud, but the new technology might not be available until the end of the year or the beginning of 2018, The Information said.

VMware stock was up more than 2 percent and Amazon stock was up slightly following the Information report.

AWS did not immediately respond to a request for comment. VMware had no comment.