The recent re: Invent show in Las Vegas gave AWS a chance to show itself as a real company, a company that’s serious about doing business with real and serious companies. To many decision makers – especially in the enterprise – caution runs high. Whether a flaw or an attribute, that cautiousness is endemic in large companies. It always has been, and there’s only so much Amazon’s boasts about higher throughput and lower cost of ownership can do to temper that instinct.

When you are talking about something as abstract as the cloud, it’s not difficult to see why those cautious inclinations crank into high gear. Can a big, security-obsessed company with its own rugged (and expensive) in-house IT operation really send a significant part of its business off into the cloud? Amazon tried hard to convince its show attendees that they can.

In the new issue of Modern Infrastructure, TechTarget’s Beth Pariseau tells us about the extent Amazon went to allay concerns held by those prudent enterprise big shots. The Vegas event, she writes, “gave enterprise IT pros and analysts the kind of conference experience they expect. And Amazon made it clear that it’s gunning for enterprise customers.”

So did Amazon’s splashy event do the trick? Do you think in-person presentations, keynote speeches and handshaking can make the cloud real enough to woo the enterprise?

Cloud APIs give developers programmatic access to services, such as storing data, updating a database or provisioning a server. But making these services work hinges on there being similar code between the source and the destination for data and applications. If they differ, enter interoperability and portability concerns. And this is where the vendor battle for the hearts and minds of end users has emerged: At one side of the ring, there is Amazon Web Services’ cloud API, which is becoming the de facto standard. Companies like Citrix Systems and Eucalyptus make private cloud products that are compatible with AWS. On the other side of the ring is OpenStack, which held early allure and may still come out on top. It is championed by companies like Rackspace and Cisco Systems. The upcoming OpenStack Summit 2012 may give the standard some traction as well.

While this might seem like a trivial detail–I have a list of such things that I don’t really care about–if you’re a cloud architect or IT manager with vested infrastructure interests in the cloud, you should care. Why? Because the platform choices you make could be incompatible with one another.

Randy Bias — the co-founder and chief technology officer of Cloudscaling, an open source cloud infrastructure provider –recently discussed the impact of this standards war among cloud providers and how today’s patchwork will ultimately give way to a more uniform cloud universe. To find out more about Bias’s view on which standard the industry will ultimately choose, check out our inaugural issue of Modern Infrastructure.

On my way to breakfast this morning, I grabbed a complimentary paper copy of the New York Times (I know, how quaint…). Page one featured a glowing story about Amazon Web Services, whose goal is to give “anyone on the planet an almost unimaginable amount of computing power,” the paper giddily reported.

Judging from the show floor, VMworld’s 23,000 attendees and 250-plus vendors haven’t read the article, or at least, don’t seem to think it applies to them. There, every IT vendor on the planet except Amazon (which is not surprisingly, not exhibiting) is busy regaling eager attendees with demos of their latest “engineered systems,” private cloud management stacks, flash arrays and backup software. These are all products predicated on robust in-house data centers teeming with dedicated infrastructure – but is that really the way things are headed?

VMware has built out an amazing technology and ecosystem, but let’s face it, the conversation has moved on. It’s AWS, not VMware, that has captured the hearts and minds of developers and startup owners everywhere, and its dirt-cheap costs, global presence and plentiful add-on services are increasingly driving enterprise business owners to the platform.

That has tremendous implications for VMware and its users. While there’s an enormous amount of on-premise, non-cloud infrastructure out there that needs to be configured and maintained, that estate will dwindle over time as more and more workloads are born on or migrated to the cloud – and from this vantage point, it doesn’t look like that cloud will be based on VMware, said Sacha Labourey, CEO and founder at CloudBees, a Java PaaS startup.

Amazon is not only the leading cloud player today, the race isn’t even close. There is some desire for Amazon alternatives, but the depth of its services and the speed of innovation “are like a magnet” that draw more and more customers in its fold, said Labourey.

VMware’s cloud efforts like vCloud and Cloud Foundry, meanwhile, are perceived to be expensive and moribund, and the company is stymied by its existing revenues and partnerships from going all out on cloud.

VMware is stuck between remaining in the past as a software vendor, or moving forward and becoming a service provider, Labourey said. The former has a terrific revenue stream and lots of inertia, “but what’s next?” and the latter creates conflict with its partner ecosystem that is hard to swallow. “It’s a tough move to make.”

For now, VMware insists that it will stay the course, despite rumors that it will jump in to the IaaS market with Project Zephyr. Asked about Zephyr at a press conference yesterday, Bogomil Balkansky, VMware senior vice president for cloud infrastructure products, reiterated the company’s intention to remain a software vendor.

But while VMware hasn’t been able to pull the trigger quite yet, don’t think that change isn’t coming for IT.

“Fast forward ten years. If you need a new application, the first thing you do is look for a SaaS version. If there is one, you’re done,” said Labourey. “If not, you go to PaaS, and you’ve never once touched an IaaS layer,” he said, much less dedicated infrastructure.

That’s a sea change for IT – the bulk of VMware’s customers, and what VMworld is all about. If everything is being done in PaaS and SaaS, “you’re not building IT stacks anymore,” rendering much of what IT folks do on a day to day basis irrelevant.

“It’s going to be a few years before the tsunami really hits,” Labourey said, “but if you want to stay in IT, you should go work for a cloud provider, or learn how to code.”