Cloud will definitely play a major role in the discussions and announcements taking place at VMworld in a couple of weeks, but VMware (VMW) isn’t waiting to start hyping its public cloud services. The company’s head of hybrid cloud solutions told eWeek earlier this week that VMware will be beefing up its public cloud services—an area of cloud computing that is overshadowed by VMware’s private cloud and virtualization technologies.

Bill Fathers, general manager and senior vice president of Hybrid Cloud at VMware, hinted at big things to come from VMware in the public cloud realm. And it’s likely we’ll hear more of that talk later in this month when partners, customers and vendors converge on San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

Mobile and cloud will be front and center at VMworld this year. When it comes to the public cloud, Fathers told eWeek that the “current model going to continue to scale” and that VMware is looking for ways to differentiate itself.

But how is VMware going to do that? According to the article, VMware thinks the key to differentiation and building its public cloud services business is in compatibility with existing IT environments.

It feels like there’s an unspoken criticism of its major infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) competitors in that statement.

If VMware is correct in its thinking about the future of the public cloud, then it may have a real shot at heading the change off at the pass and building the solutions organizations need. It also has a long history of working with both on-premise and off-premise IT, which could give it a leg up.

But considering VMware’s public cloud initiatives are little more than a year old and its greatest cloud success has been in the private cloud area (y’know, not including all that pesky virtualization technology that is the foundation of cloud). If VMware intends to take on the largest public cloud companies, it will have to make some stellar announcements later this month at VMworld.