VMware faces tough competition in its Kubernetes enterprise strategy. Hyperscalers and cloud builders such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are all beefing up their internal enterprise resources and working with teams of partners to add enterprise support. Microsoft has used that kind of partnership strategy to dominate the enterprise landscape for more than a quarter century. IBM is pursuing a strategy similar to VMware's, marrying public cloud and Kubernetes expertise with broad enterprise abilities and customer relationships. For a while, IBM had difficulty gaining traction there, perceived in the market as an unsuccessful Amazon competitor and pursuing the pipe dreams of Watson and blockchain, which have yielded little market traction. But more recently, IBM has been singing loudly about its enterprise hybrid cloud strengths, and last year's $34 billion Red Hat acquisition and new CEO will help the strategy along.