I seem to be frequently asked about my thoughts on VMWare (and to some extent Spring Source) and their acquisitions, or rumoured acquisitions - in terms of what they are doing "with the cloud".
To me its pretty simple: Machine virtualisation is what enabled the so-called cloud computing evolution to start happening - making use of excess physical capacity, portable workloads, management apis etc. - and continues to be the cornerstone of clouds (with the notable exception of newservers.com !).
Of course, my personal first experience with virtualisation was with VMWare itself - usually in places where it was used to slice up machines for multiple test environments. I would bet it is the same for many. I think VMWare see themselves are the originator of this revolution/evolution and see it as their rightful place to be a top tier cloud service provider (both in terms of software, and providing, possibly, publicly available servers on demand). It might mess with their software licence business model, but to them, it doesn't matter, as they see themselves has having a right to be up there with ec2, with rackspace etc ! Good luck to them.
