Public-cloud market leader Amazon Web Services just lost one of its top promoters.

Simone Brunozzi, who worked as a technology evangelist for Amazon’s cloud since as early as 2008 — two years after its debut — has decamped to virtualization-software giant VMware.

In his now role as vice president and chief technologist of hybrid cloud at VMware, he’ll be dealing with a different customer mix while working on the vCloud Hybrid Service, essentially a public cloud where companies can build new applications or relocate existing ones from their on-premises data centers.

“The position I was offered … is both a challenge and an opportunity for me: new types of customers (more enterprise, less SMBs and startups), different ways to adopt and buy services, different barriers and incentives at play, and ultimately different players in the game,” he wrote in a blog post published today about his new gig.

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The move could just be a function of Brunozzi being hungry for more responsibility — and a larger paycheck. But it could also suggest that in the growing cloud market, there won’t be just one winner.

VMware tells a story of being the compadre to thousands upon thousands of companies that still run their own data centers but increasingly want to tap the cloud. Deployments exclusively on public clouds are still the exception to the rule, and companies still spend billions to run their own IT operations. VMware has a strong foothold among these companies, even if its public cloud narrative is still nascent. Which is why getting in on vCloud Hybrid Service early and helping it scale could be a great fit for Brunozzi.

He’s isn’t the only big IT figure to jump to VMware lately. Brunozzi mentioned that Chris Wolf, who was previously a research vice president covering private cloud and virtualization at analyst firm Gartner, recently moved to the company. And last August, VMware announced a new chief information officer in Tony Scott, who had held that position at VMware competitor Microsoft.

As for Brunozzi, he seems to have found his dream job — not our words; they’re actually from Amazon.com chief technology officer Werner Vogels:

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