In Part 3 of the applications in the cloud segement (You can read Part 1 and Part 2 here) were going to switch the focus from the end user (sort of) to the administrator/developer/datacenter and talk about Virtual Appliances and how they can be utilized to increase the availibility, performance and overall cost of ownership for client server applications in the datacenter.  By using Virtual Appliances and applying the principals of “Just Enough OS” (JEOS, horrible acronym) virtual appliances can be like ThinApp for the datacenter.  Allowing your applications to be abstracted from the bare metal of the systems that is running them, providing portability, security and performance to make operate effectively in the cloud. Read more >>

Not a big surprise but much of the VMWorld 2010 conference was spent discussing “what is the cloud? and “how we will get there?.  There are specific answers and roadmaps to the second question but the first still is difficult to answer but simple at the same time.  The “Cloud” is end user computing on any device, anywhere the user needs it.  It allows the user to abstract the applications they use from the devices they carry.  Paul Maritz, President and CEO of VMWare stated that (paraphrased) “The new IT needs to be end user focused instead of device focused, and to do this we need to build better applications that are cloud ready and can be delivered from any framework to any device.”  This means that we have to start now in thinking about applications for the future or the future of legacy applications and how they will move to and operate within this new IT.  Here is how most people will get there in reference to the second question. (Two Phases) Read more >>