SAN FRANCISCO — Google today moved into on-premises data centers and across clouds — including competitors Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure — with Anthos, its hybrid-cloud platform.

“If you are using multiple cloud environments, Anthos is the choice for you,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai, during the opening keynote at Google Cloud Next.

Anthos, which is based on Kubernetes and fully managed by Google, runs on premises and supports multiple clouds including AWS and Azure. The cloud provider first announced the platform at last year’s Google Cloud Next — at the time it was called Cloud Services Platform — and today made it generally available under the new name Anthos.

“It came from our listening to our customers who want three important things from their cloud providers,” said Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud’s new CEO. “First they want the ability to have a technology stack that they can run in their data center next to enterprise workloads that they couldn’t yet move to the cloud. Second: a single programming model that gives them the choice and flexibility to move workloads to both Google Cloud as well as to other cloud providers without any change. And third, a platform that allows them to operate this infrastructure without complexity and to secure and manage across multiple clouds in a single and consistent way.”

Google also announced Anthos Migrate in beta, which auto-migrates virtual machines (VMs) from on-premises, or other clouds, directly into containers in Google Kubernetes Engine and without requiring any VM modifications or rewrites.

The vendor worked with a number of hardware and software companies in developing Anthos and announced more than 30 launch partners including Cisco, VMware, and Intel, among others. For example, Cisco will integrate Anthos with its data centers, networking, and security technologies including HyperFlex, ACI, Stealthwatch Cloud, and Cisco SD-WAN.

Additionally, VMware, Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Intel, and Lenovo have developed reference architectures and integrations for Anthos and validated the platform on their hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI).

VMware Chief Operating Officer Sanjay Poonen joined Kurian onstage at Cloud Next and said Anthos will integrate with Pivotal Container Service (PKS), VMware’s software-defined data center stack vSphere, and its VeloCloud SD-WAN. This will give customers “the best benefits of VeloCloud integrated natively into GCP (Google Cloud Platform) and now all of your applications in your branch offices just work faster,” Poonen said.