VMware steps up competition with Amazon Web Services by hiring away its international technology evangelist.

Simone Brunozzi was named chief technologist and senior VP for VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Service. He was recruited from Amazon Web Services and said he’ll miss working with “great people like (CTO) Werner Vogels,” but can’t resist going over to the opposite side.

VMware has urged its third-party partners to step up and compete more effectively with Amazon for cloud customers. At its Partner World in April, president Carl Eschenbach urged them to bypass being beaten by a would-be technology company “that sells books.” Now VMware is recruiting former booksellers into its own ranks: among his other credits, Brunozzi said he used to be a novelist.

VMware announced Friday that Brunozzi has resigned from Amazon as a senior technology evangelist to aid VMware establish the cloud credentials of its vCloud Hybrid Service. Brunozzi grew up in Assisi, Italy, and can help with VMware’s plans to expand vCloud Hybrid Service into Europe.

[Need to learn more about VMware’s public cloud initiative? See 4 Things VMware Must Do At VMworld.]

Brunozzi was an entrepreneur, a college professor, and CTO of Foreigners University in Perugia, Italy. Between 2008 and 2014 he was one of the most frontline evangelists for Amazon Web Services. It was an immense step for him, he said in a VMware blog posted Friday, to go away Italy and visit work “for a bit bookstore up in Seattle.” He has frequently been the general public face at AWS events, and frequently teased that the males in his audience looked disappointed that somebody named Simone “isn’t a phenomenal Italian woman.”

“Wow, what a ride it’s been. i’m very grateful for my time there,” he wrote of his six years at Amazon.

Brunozzi also wrote of his reasons for changing positions. He said VMware is at the move and “reinventing itself. You’ll discover the signs throughout, it’s like… an old city suddenly enjoying a gold rush: old buildings are replaced by shiny new ones, streets become busier than ever, and you’re feeling that vibration throughout you.”

Brunozzi said VMware now has greater than 14,500 employees, and he looks forward to engaged on its European expansion. He also cited two other recently filled technologist positions he’ll work with. One is Ben Fathi, VMware’s former senior VP for R&D, named global CTO on Jan. 8. He’s been at VMware for 2 years. Just before that, he was a senior VP for the operating system and network protocol teams at Cisco Systems. He replaced Steve Herrod. Any other person is Chris Wolf, a former Burton Group and Gartner analyst, named VMware CTO for the Americas on Jan. 27.

Brunozzi also wrote in regards to the atmosphere he found inside VMware in his first week. “I already feel that this company genuinely cares about things reminiscent of the surroundings, giving back, and the well-being of others.” He said he was new to the company’s green and charitable initiatives but will elaborate in future posts “at the beautiful details of what I’ve seen.”

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Charles Babcock is an editor-at-large for InformationWeek, having joined the publication in 2003. He’s the previous editor-in-chief of Digital News, former software editor of Computerworld and previous technology editor of Interactive Week. He’s a graduate of Syracuse … View Full Bio

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