Ok.. Its proven. No-one in the industry can keep up with Scott with blogging. You want a live blog go here.

The Cloud. Business Complexity. Give businesses Flexibility.

The great question is how do you do this? Much of the point is "Simplify so things can happen since it is so complex today." People understand the current environments where application stacks exist on physical hardware instances and it works. Complex, though it works.

The Cloud that VMware is proposing is a layer between this hard tie of Physical Hardware to the Application Stack. Much of this is not anything new to folks. It is a straight up thought of API development. Take something that lot of different systems/interfaces do and abstract it into an object with well defined interfaces.

By adding in this additional layer IT and business can simplify those interactions. This is an amazing and great piece of simplification that is being offered. Not something to make light of if one has worked in a seriously large IT shop. VMware is the only company I've seen to date that has taken a serious analysis of these interfaces between the different technologies and domains involved in supplying services from IT to the business side. This covers all the various pieces of the VMware structure like vSecurity, vStorage, vNetwork, vCompute, vAvailability, vScalability and the other vStuff.

The individualized components that now have well defined (or at least a first run at it) of these interfaces. So the complexity can still exist inside of the box that is defined though others can deal with that component in a nice clean way.

Then too you can start producing some nice flexibility to do auto provisioning and self management. Since you have this API you can control anything that talks to those interaction points. This is why VMware is on the cutting edge and Microsoft & Citrix are still behind.