VMware believes the future of the cloud is in hybrid services and is rebranding its flagship service to signal its belief that a hybrid cloud will benefit private and public cloud users.

Only 2 percent of work was completed using the public cloud in 2009, according to Bill Fathers, senior vice president and general manager of VMware's hybrid cloud services business unit. But, five years later, that figure has risen to 6 percent. That increase shows growth is solid and more innovative processes can be established.

The "hybrid cloud is the future. We believe the cloud is moving from a period of experimentation into the phase of professional deployment," he said, noting  the rebranding lets VMware provide an industrial-strength solution.

As part of that effort and also entice more users, the company's vCloud Hybrid Service is now VMware vCloud Air, Tech Times reports, with unified networking, management and security.

That announcement, made ahead of this week's VMware's VMworld 2014 event in San Francisco, is likely a response to the rising threat of Amazon Web Services' own cloud service, which earlier this month expanded its presence in Japan with a partnership with SoftBank.

VMware is hopeful that it can continue to deliver the best-quality services and products for business and personal needs, securely and with the same speed. The company, which has maintained its position atop the cloud industry for the past few years, believes the future will be cloud-based and feels that it can help innovation by making it easier to do business.

"In the last nine months, the rates in which enterprises have added workloads to the public cloud has sprinted away exponentially. Historically, it was a bit clogged, but now things are starting to accelerate," Fathers said.

He argued that by moving to a hybrid cloud offering through its vCloud Air network, the company can address a number of recent cloud-related issues. Among those are making cloud platforms more agile and capable of delivering the needs of a business on the go, from multiple locations, as well as improving functionality and bringing down costs to make the cloud more consumable for a larger audience and user base.