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You know the competition is heating up when companies start banning rivals from their own industry conferences. The latest example? This week Amazon Web Services dis-invited Google personnel from AWS Re:Invent.

Per an email an [company]Amazon[/company] official sent to one of the would-be attendees:

… AWS re:Invent is Amazon Web Services’ global customer and partner conference and it appears you are not currently a customer or partner. Since tickets are reserved for customers and partners, not competitors, we have canceled your registration and refunded the full ticket price of $1299.

The recipient was referred to the free Re:Invent live stream. It’s unclear if Microsoft people have been similarly axed. Google and Microsoft are mounting well-funded challenges to Amazon’s public cloud dominance.

I’ve reached out to AWS for comment, but to be fair, there is precedent here. Last year, [company]Microsoft[/company] added AWS personnel to its banned list for its Worldwide Partner Conference. That select list already included [company]Google[/company], [company]VMware[/company], and [company]Salesforce.com[/company]. Note that AWS, VMware, Google and Salesforce.com are all — to some degree — Microsoft partners.

And, VMware didn’t let partners Nutanix and Veeam attend its partner event. The motivation is that the hosting vendor worries that rivals will comb the conferences for competitive intelligence.

So much for the spirit of industry coopetition.