VMware might have been chased away from the public cloud business, but it's having no problem cozying up to the winners.

The virtualization vendor is on the verge of announcing a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Fortune reports. The amusing irony is that in 2013, VMware had declared public clouds, especially AWS, the enemy.

Details about the announcement, coming on Oct. 13, are scarce but would presumably include steps to help customers use AWS to run environments based on VMware's vSphere.

Customers can already do that in AWS and Microsoft Azure, but the process is based on publicly available APIs. In other words, it gets accomplished without the active help or support of the cloud providers.

The AWS announcement could also be a chance for VMware to promote Cross-Cloud Services, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that was launched in technology preview form at VMworld in August. The offering aims to bring all cloud management under one roof, so to speak. Its features include automated migration of workloads from one cloud to another, regardless of whether either cloud is running vSphere.

A few years ago, VMware had aspirations of running its own public cloud. But like many competitors, the company dropped those plans as AWS' dominance became evident.

Rather than give up on the public cloud, VMware switched tactics. One highlighted topic at VMworld in August was a partnership to support VMware environments on IBM’s cloud.

One twist to that deal was that IBM often competes with Dell, which, as of August, was on the verge of closing its acquisition of EMC. EMC owned an 80 percent stake in VMware. So, VMware had struck a deal with one of its future parent company's largest rivals.

"IBM's not a great partner of Dell," VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger deadpanned at VMworld. He recalled having to run the partnership past Michael Dell, CEO and founder of Dell. "Michael's comment was, very quickly: 'That's good for VMware; you should do it,'" Gelsinger said.

VMware and IBM have long been pals. In fact, "IBM runs one of the largest VMware environments in the world," Gelsinger said.

More cross-collaboration among IT giants is likely, Michael Dell said during a media session at VMworld. The driving force is a customer base that wants combinations of the products and services they've grown comfortable with. "Increasingly, customers are saying, 'Which vendors are the vendors I trust?'" he said. He was specifically talking about Dell and IBM, but there's no question AWS has also won certain customers' trust.