VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger (left) hugs AWS CEO Andy Jassy at VMworld 2018, an embrace that would have seemed very unlikely just a few years ago. (VMware Photo)

VMware plans to expand its presence in Bellevue with enough space to double its headcount in the region its two most important partners call home, according to a report.

The Puget Sound Business Journal reported this week that the virtualization software company has signed a deal for more space inside the City Center Bellevue building, a short walk from the Meydenbauer Center, the home of the GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit the past two years. VMware is thought to have a few hundred people in the area, and it has a keen interest in hiring all the same cloud computing engineers and product managers that has led nearly everyone else to the region.

After VMware figured out how it could work together with cloud vendors like Amazon Web Services, its prospects and share price have reached new heights. A 2016 partnership agreement between the two companies ended a period of a few years in which many people — including CEO Pat Gelsinger — thought AWS was going to run right over VMware’s central role inside many enterprise computing shops.

Now the two companies have collaborated on several products designed for hybrid cloud users, and often appear at each other’s events. VMware’s software allows companies running their own servers to set up and manage virtual machines to extract more performance per box, and while the growth of cloud computing has taken some of the steam out of that market, there are still a lot of companies that want or need to maintain their own infrastructure for certain workloads.

VMware’s office is also, of course, right in Microsoft’s back yard. Those two companies have also competed, and then partnered, on several services related to on-premises software and hybrid cloud deployments over the years.

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