VMWorld 2010

VMware hosted their seventh annual VMWorld 2010 conference from August 30th to September 2nd at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. With number of attendees exceeding 17000, and around 233 sponsors and exhibitors participating, shows that cloud computing is not longer

just a buzzword. During the conference, the virtualization giant had its top brass, Paul Maritz (President and CEO) and Steve Herrod (CTO and senior VP R&D), outlining the company's vision toward the cloud and IT as a service.

With their Cloud infrastructure strategy, VMware introduced new products and services that help organizations adopt a model to deliver and consume IT services across hybrid clouds. VMware vCloud Director is the premier product in that offering that enables an

organization to form virtual datacenters across the enterprise, thus having a pooled resource for their own private cloud. In conjunction with that, vCloud Datacenter services provide a way for enterprises to extend their datacenters to external clouds while maintaining security and compliance. As security is a primary concern in cloud infrastructure, VMware introduced vShield family of security products that cater to virtualized and cloud environments. While vFabric, a cloud application platform was also introduced which allows Spring based application development and runtime environment. With this an enterprise would be able to port their application on any Cloud, thus avoiding a lockin with any vendor.

With enterprises struggling to provide secure access to their mobile workforce and managing ever increasing volume of data and applications, the traditional desktop computing is not feasible. A user-centric personal computing approach is required, and VMware's View and ThinApp products are enablers for that. As SaaS based applications are becoming more generic and used for business needs, it makes sense to enable IT for this change, and the new offerings from VMware help organizations in the transition to this new computing paradigm where IT delivers services to meet the ever changing business requirements.

The author was hosted by VMware in San Francisco.