Uncovering and explaining how our digital world is changing — and changing us.

This story is part of a group of stories called

Amazon’s fast-growing cloud service just landed another high-profile customer. Enterprise heavyweight VMware is using AWS for its new cloud service, the two companies confirmed Thursday at an event at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in San Francisco. The news was a bit anticlimactic as VMware had jumped the gun with a blog post earlier in the day.

But the partnership itself represents a significant shift for VMware and demonstrates just how much AWS has grown too big to ignore. VMware had previously declared AWS its sworn enemy.

“This is the result of customers telling us what they needed,” VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said at the event.

The service, which will be sold and supported by VMware, will debut next year, with pricing yet to be announced.

AWS is the $10 billion-a-year business that nearly everyone in the tech industry relies on and few outside of it have ever heard of.

Historically, VMware has been strong inside companies’ own data centers, while AWS is what companies turn to instead of running their own data centers. Increasingly, though, even customers using VMware in their own servers want a cloud-based option.

And while Amazon built its cloud business as an inexpensive option for startups, AWS chief Andy Jassy said the company is increasingly getting attention from larger companies.

“Those benefits are just as compelling to enterprises,” Jassy said.