VMware is supposed to report its second-quarter results on Tuesday July 22 and people will be tuning in to see how EMC's abrupt ouster of the virtualization leader's CEO and co-founder Diane Greene last week is handled and what is added to the news that VMware isn't going to make its full-year 2008 guidance of 50% growth over 2007. Parent company EMC said last week that VMware would come in 'modestly below' its revenue goals because of a more challenging spending environment but left Q2 guidance of 55% growth in place.

Tripwire announced the availability of Tripwire ConfigCheck for VMware ESX 3.0. Tripwire ConfigCheck is a free utility that assesses configuration settings for VMware ESX 3.0 and 3.5 hypervisors, determines potential configuration risks, and provides prescriptive remediation advice so that administrators can ensure greater security.

3PAR announced the 3PAR Thin Copy Desktop for VMware VDI, an integrated virtual desktop provisioning and management solution for VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). 3PAR Thin Copy Desktop for VMware VDI is designed to let customers automatically provision hundreds of high-performance virtual desktops that consume only a fraction of the bandwidth and storage capacity required with traditional storage. By leveraging the unique performance benefits of 3PAR Utility Storage, 3PAR Thin Copy Desktop for VMware VDI offers customers cost-effective and simple storage scaling for VMware VDI environments.

AppSense reported a 50 percent increase in U.S. revenue for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2008. Its global business - which includes a growing customer base of over 4,000 - realized a 30 percent increase in worldwide revenue, continuing its trend of 30 percent growth each year since 2005.

BakBone is providing comprehensive, easy-to-manage VMware and heterogeneous data protection solutions for The Latin School of Chicago, helping the school keep its focus on students, rather than data protection. An independent, coeducational day school located on the Near North Side of Chicago, The Latin School of Chicago ranks among the nation's best schools in the informed use of technology in the classroom and for school administration. They utilize technology to support efficient, reliable operation of the school and provide tools that enhance both internal and external communications.

3PAR, the utility storage company, says it's got an integrated virtual desktop provisioning and management solution for the VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) that will also scale VDI storage. It's supposed to automatically provision hundreds of high-performance virtual desktops that consume only a fraction of the bandwidth and storage capacity required with traditional storage, hence the name Thin Copy Desktop for VMware VDI.

Two weeks after its co-founder and CEO Diane Greene was abruptly dismissed, VMware - now run by one of Microsoft's old rulers, Paul Maritz - disclosed exactly how much under its promised 50% year-over-year growth 2008 is going to be. It's going to be 5%-8% short of the magic number. Reason of course dictates that 42%-45% growth may some day look heroic.

Q-layer announced the Q-layer Delegation Manager, a solution that turns virtual server environments into a true cloud computing platform. This release of Delegation Manager provides complete support for VMware Infrastructure 3 environments, including the VMware ESX Hypervisor, with future support for additional Hypervisors including Xen, Sun Microsystems' xVM VirtualBox and Microsoft Hyper-V. The Q-layer Delegation Manager enables fast browser-based provisioning of data center assets for helpdesk, technical end-users and non- technical end-users, with integrated credit-based charge-back capabilities, reporting and easy to use flash-based management controls. Q-layer's Delegation Manager is installed in minutes through the VMware Virtual Center as a Virtual Appliance and builds on Q-layer's VPDC and Datacenter Abstraction Layer (DAL) technology. It enables model-driven orchestration capabilities for data centers, including workflows to cohesively orchestrate virtual servers, networks and storage.

CohesiveFT and Skytap announced a technology partnership to distribute CohesiveFT's Elastic Servers to Skytap's Virtual Lab platform. The combined solution will provide application development and test teams the capability to dynamically assemble and deploy custom application stacks to a virtual test cloud, freeing them from time-consuming build and set-up tasks and the constraints of traditional test lab environments.

Novell says it's going to 'simplify' pricing and discounts on SLES for mainframes for the rest of the year. That means it's going to cut prices by 33%-47% by offering a three-year subscription for the price of a two-year subscription or a five-year subscription for the price of a three-year subscription. The discounts apply to workload consolidation from non-System z platforms and renewals of existing SLES subscriptions.

Q-layer announced that it has expanded its operation into the United States. Founded in 2005 in Belgium, the company has experienced great success in the European market with the Virtual Private Data Center software targeted at Service Providers. With the opening of the new office in Mountain View, CA, Q-layer also announced the worldwide appointment of Matthew Powell to president and chief executive officer. As President and CEO, Powell will provide strategic direction and management as Q-layer continues to establish itself as a high standing enabler of cloud computing.

RightScale announced RightScale Manager for MySQL Enterprise, an offering designed to make it easier for organizations to deploy MySQL databases in the Amazon Web Services cloud. Starting July 1, RightScale customers will receive the benefits of RightScale's automation and scale-on-demand cloud management platform, coupled with MySQL Enterprise premium-level support for large database applications.

Univa UD announced the publication of a white paper and supporting tools that documents the process of implementing its open source UniCluster product in Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) web service. Univa UD sponsored BioTeam, a life sciences informatics consultancy and systems integrator, to document the process and publish the tools. The paper titled How to: UniCluster and Amazon EC2, presents step by step instructions for setting up UniCluster within EC2.

Yesterday we read the news of B-hive's acquisition by VMware. Also this week Microsoft closed the Kidaro acquisition, which had been announced earlier in the year. Both of these companies participated in SYS-CON's second international Virtualization Conference & Expo last November in San Francisco. This event was also the last conference BEA Systems sponsored, days before their Oracle acquisition news hit the press. PlateSpin is one of the Gold Sponsors of the upcoming 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo in New York City. Novell bought the company before this event has even taken place. In the past six months, four out of nine Virtualization Conference sponsors were acquired.

DreamFactory, a pioneer in cloud-based Web applications and development tools, announced the company will offer its entire DreamFactory Suite on the new Intuit QuickBase Development Platform. DreamFactory's project management and collaboration cloudware will soon be readily available to millions of businesses using Intuit software.

Valtira announced the availability of The Valtira Online Marketing Platform on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Valtira customers now have access to the most cost-effective, scalable, flexible infrastructure to power their web marketing solutions.

'Traditionally people have tied their software to their hardware. Virtualization changes all that,' said Dr Stephen Herrod, CTO of VMware, the 10-year old Virtualization giant. Herrod gave a highly informative Morning Keynote today in New York City at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo, in the stately setting of the Grand Ballroom at New York's historic Roosevelt Hotel.

I always come back to this distinction between cloud and grid computing when people talk about 'in-house clouds.' It's easy to say 'ah, we'll just run some cloud management software on a bunch of machines,' but it's a completely different matter to uphold the premise of real-time resource availability. If you fail to provide resources when they are needed, the whole paradigm falls apart and users will start hoarding servers, allocating for peak usage instead of current usage, and so forth.

Recently I've been asked about the benefits of cloud computing in comparison to that of virtualization. Generally my answer has been they are an ideal match. For the most part virtualization has been about doing more with less (consolidation). VMware in particular positioned their products and pricing in a way that encourages you to use the least amount of servers possible. The interesting thing about cloud computing is it's about doing more with more. Or if you're Intel, doing more with Moore.

CDNetworks and Nirvanix announced a strategic partnership to deliver a unified cloud storage and content delivery service. Available immediately, CDNetworks' customers will be able to store unlimited amounts of protected and secure content online and move content instantly to and from any of CDNetworks' 63 nodes worldwide at previously unseen economies. The partnership with CDNetworks will provide Nirvanix customers with the ability to not only securely store massive amounts of media and content but also stage content for instant delivery anywhere in the world, utilizing one of CDNetworks' data centers for local delivery. By combining these services, companies will have better overall media delivery capability and also save 80 to 90 percent over building or growing storage infrastructures of their own.

As the cloud-o-sphere tries to define this 'cloud' thing, myself included, it seems like the list of who is a cloud just keeps getting longer and longer. I originally thought the Forrester 11 list was a little to long when it included SalesForce.com and Akamai as cloud providers. The general consensus seems to be, if you are a SaaS, PaaS, or a IaaS you are probably a cloud and this makes the list even longer.

Web hosting company, Rackspace Managed Hosting's Mosso cloud division, has developed a new control panel including a new provisioning system for its flagship product, The Hosting Cloud.

The conference theme of the Virtualization Conference & Expo Europe, to be held in London, England, January 26-27, 2009, is 'Deploying Virtualization in the Enterprise.' The Call for Papers, which is now open, welcomes submissions from exceptional speakers with high-quality use cases not only of how virtualization maximizes the use of resources and thus saves companies money, but also of how it is fundamentally altering the way that businesses run IT.

Two of the biggest launches in Rich Internet Application history took place in 2007/2008 when Adobe launched AIR 1.0 in February '08 and Microsoft launched Silverlight (September '07). At the 6th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo in October SYS-CON Events is delighted to be presenting major industry keynotes from the two industry executives with overall responsibility for both of those massive richer-web initiatives: Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch and Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform.

SYS-CON Events announced today that the Virtualization on Wall Street Conference & Expo will take place on March 22-24, 2009, in New York City. The event is expected to attract over 1,000 developers, architects, IT managers, and software professionals of every stripe who will be converging in New York City to attend this comprehensive meeting on Virtualization on Wall Street.

Virtualization has quickly become a staple new concept for enterprise IT. At SYS-CON's 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo, held at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, June 23-24, we had exceptional speakers with high-quality use cases not only of how virtualization maximizes the use of resources and thus saves companies money, but also of how it is fundamentally altering the way that businesses run IT. The two content-packed days emphasized value with a rich array of sessions about the business and technical value of virtualization.

Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens, Citrix CTO Simon Crosby, Egenera CTO Pete Manca, Allen Stewart, Group Manager, Windows Virtualization at Microsoft, and Brian Duckering, Sr. Director of Products and Alliances at Symantec were the top industry executives who joined Jeremy Geelan in the 4th Floor Reuters Studio overlooking Times Square for a special SYS-CON.TV 'Virtualization Power Panel' recorded on June 22, 2008, the day before the opening of SYS-CON's 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo - which was held 23-24 June 2008 in New York City.

There hasn't been a PowerPC-based computer since Apple abandoned the dingus and bolted to Intel, a move that did wonders for Apple's volumes. Now a Mountain View start-up called CherryPal is about to introduce a $249 Debian-based desktop that's about the size of a dime store paperback built around the 2W MPC5121e mobileGT PowerPC chip that Freescale usually sells to Detroit for navigation devices.

Cloud Computing is the new buzz word in the technology industry. But even industry insiders don't agree on exactly what the term means. Mike Eaton, Founder and CEO of Cloudworks and Atticus Information Systems, will be giving a breakout session at SYS-CON's 'Cloud Computing Expo' (November 20-21, 2008) - an adjunct to the 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held at The Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA.

I was chatting with a customer the other day who was struggling with some of the implications of cloud computing. The analogy that finally made sense to them is what I will call 'cloud dining.' I am the cook in the house and I am tasked with feeding the family. If my 10-year old is lobbying for Italian, I can cook at home or order out. The decision may also vary from day to day. For instance, I might not have all the ingredients and have to order out, or, like this weekend, it may be 103 outside and cooking at home is not all that appealing. Now, the same can be said for supporting a given application in a cloud computing environment.

Just as people begin to understand the difference between web ops and IT, we are entering a period where clouds promise 'Ops-Free' computing. Because it's easy, scalable, available and disposable, the cloud is well on its way to becoming 'technology's next big thing.' However, with recent outages from Amazon and Google Apps, the question of the cloud's competence, security and reliability have come into play. In this session, Hyperic's CEO, Javier Soltero will address these issues along with the many others surrounding the cloud including: The emergence of web operations as a discipline, How cloud computing simply changes, instead of eliminating the importance of web operations, What tools are available to help better manage cloud environments?

Mike Eaton, the founder and CEO of Cloudworks, provides five tips for companies watching their bottom line in a tight economy to enhance the remote access for mobile professionals through cloud computing.

10gen announced $1.5 million in Series A financing from Union Square Ventures. The cloud computing company, founded earlier this year by DoubleClick veterans Kevin Ryan, Dwight Merriman and Eliot Horowitz, and former Joost engineering VP, Geir Magnusson Jr., aims to provide significant time and cost saving advantages by allowing developers to focus on solving business problems and delivering functionality rather than expending effort on infrastructure, scaling and system management.

Net One Systems and 3Tera announced that the two companies have signed a multi-year agreement naming Net One Systems as the exclusive distributor of 3Tera's AppLogic, the commercial grid OS for cloud computing, in Japan. Starting immediately, Net One Systems will offer cloud computing infrastructure and services using 3Tera's AppLogic. First customer deployments will be announced later this month.

VMware announced that more than 40 universities in Australia and New Zealand are using VMware virtualization to enhance the online experience of their students. VMware is working with the Council of Australian University Directors of Information Technology (CAUDIT) which paves the way for more than 40 member institutions to deliver virtualization solutions at standard and low costs, regardless of a school's size. CAUDIT members include nearly every university in Australia and New Zealand.

Cloud Computing offers significant benefits over traditional solutions for deploying production systems as well as for conducting development and testing activities. Dr Thorsten von Eicken, CTO of RightScale, Inc., will be giving a session at SYS-CON's 'Cloud Computing Expo' (November 20-21, 2008) - an adjunct to the 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held at The Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA.

The future model for providing IT infrastructure and services in large organizations is what many today are calling 'Cloud Computing' - a concept popularized by Amazon through its web services efforts. Merrill Lynch analysts for example reckon that by 2011 the volume of Cloud Computing market opportunity will amount to $160BN, including $95N in business and productivity apps (e-mail, office, CRM, etc.) and $65BN in online advertising.

With the stock market crashing, or giving a good approximation of a crash Thursday, Yahoo, poor thing - well, it has behaved like a sick lost puppy, now hasn't it - announced a supposedly pressure-relieving reorganization just like its familiars in the press said it would. It is, as was widely observed, the company's third or fourth attempt in the last 18 months or so - one loses count after a while - to rearrange the deck chairs and supposedly prove it can stay afloat with Microsoft out of the picture.

Reminding people of how its backing was the making of Linux, IBM, to no one's surprise, has thrown its support behind cloud computing, that delicious nexus of every chi-chi buzzword technology currently in vogue: Web 2.0, rich Internet applications, software-as-a-service, SOA, grid computing, Web Services, virtualization and utility computing. IBM calls its initiative Blue Cloud - like it could have another name - and claims it's a 'game-changing model for Internet-scale computing,' providing customer with just the right size computer power while at one and the same time being 'green' as well as 'self-healing and self-managing' based on open standards and Linux. Lordy, if this thing was a cute guy with money, it would be every mother's dream.

Cloud Computing, in its current incarnation, falls short on its promise to make computing as a whole as simple as plugging an application into a utility service. Kirill Sheynkman, Founder & CEO of Elastra Corporation, will be giving a session on Elastic Computing vs. Cloud Computing at SYS-CON's 'Cloud Computing Expo' (November 20-21, 2008) - a brand new adjunct to the 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held at The Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA.