VMware’s initial focus for releasing the vCloud Initiative is to assist customers to bridge the current datacenter to the future Cloud.  150,000 customers are already standardizing on VMware, which has definitely prepared them for the this evolution.  VMware’s main focuses with their initiative are: Enterprise Ready, Choice and Application Compatibility.  All this is rolled up into the vCloud Express offering, which enables customers easy web access (with a simple credit card transaction) to build an external cloud presence.

All the typical big players are involved, along with 1000+ service providers (including one I consider close to home, but more on that later) – just look for the VMware Ready logo. Providing a cloud platform is a natural evolution for companies like AT&T, who currently provide an entire range of hosting services to over half of the Fortune 50.

Workload Federation is the ability to migrate server workloads around within a company’s federated cloud (internal + external), even across datacenters.  Savvis introduced a cloud offering that includes tiered SLAs.  Their web interface for signing up and setting up a virtual private data center includes a standard reference architecture with drag and drop components and selection of tiers (including storage tiering).

Standards will be an important key to long term cloud success and VMware is leading the charge.

In my opinion, this is the kind of stuff VMware should be showing everyone, not just the press and bloggers.  Hopefully we’ll see more of this in the keynote tomorrow morning.  This actually helps solidify the cloud into an actual offering that users can see and believe in.