Some might say VMware recognized the threat levied against them by public cloud far too late; similar to Cisco, VMware's core business is not aligned with customers who want to move workloads to public cloud providers.
More public cloud workloads = fewer hypervisor licenses (or UCS servers in Cisco's case) sold to customers. VMware has tried to mitigate this over the years by launching what became vCloud Air back in 2013.
By 2016, VMware appeared to acknowledge reality, and began to offer "VMware on AWS". By early 2017, vCloud Air was boxed up and sold to OVH.