It’s bought SlideRocket, a five-year-old San Francisco SaaS-based business presentation ISV that leverages cloud computing, collaboration, social media and mobile computing platforms, giving it a practically perfect checklist score, especially if you throw in the fact that, in keeping with the custom of the day, it gives its entry-level widgetry away for free.

This checklist paradigm claims more than 20,000 customers and 300,000 users, a base it’s built up since its software left beta in October of 2008. In that space of time it says its widgetry was used to produce 10 million presentations.

VMware observes that presentation software – to wit the “25-year-old” PowerPoint – is second only to e-mail as the most widely used business tool. And VMware’s already got Zimbra’s open source e-mail and collaboration software from Yahoo, an application ornament that, like SlideRocket, is evidently supposed to advance its scheme whatever it is.

It also just took over Mozy, the consumer online backup operation, from its parent company EMC, and went into the Platform-as-a-Service business a couple of weeks ago with an open source thing called Cloud Foundry for building applications that run and scale in the cloud, anybody’s cloud, public or private.

The Cloud Foundry move pushed Gartner VP Chris Wolf to remark that “VMware can’t remain primarily as a platform for Windows applications in an area where Microsoft is a direct competitor. That story always ends the same.” Like a lot of other people he’s just not sure, when all is said and done, if VMware will be an enabler or a provider.

Perhaps it will be clearer what VMware wants to be when it grows up when it releases its reported Project Horizon applications portal and management widgetry in a few weeks. It’s eventually supposed to handle both on-premise and cloud apps.

VMware said the SlideRocket acquisition would advance its vision of leveraging cloud computing “to deliver access to applications and data from any device, where and when a user needs it” and “help VMware drive a new model for end-user computing for the enterprise.”

It claims SlideRocket offers distinct advantages that separate it from who-know-who’s “legacy PC-era presentation technologies” such as:
* Online authoring, editing and access combined with built-in collaboration and version control allowing simultaneous team-based authoring while preserving a single consistent file
* An intuitive web-based interface for incorporating video, audio, photos and transitions and quickly assembling rich dynamic presentations
* Dynamic data feeds from sources like Google, Twitter, Salesforce and financial services to create charts and graphs, social network feeds and embedded financial data that are up-to-date and real-time
* Shared access, both online and offline, across a range of end-user devices, from desktops to mobile devices and tablets
* A centralized shared content library that speeds design time and drives consistency across organizations
* Unique real-time viewer feedback and analytics to capture key usage metrics, provide insight into presentation effectiveness and continually improve content

Naturally there’s also the inevitable SlideRocket Marketplace for browsing and purchasing content including themes, stock photography, graphics, data feeds, audio, video, illustrations, animations and plug-ins. And naturally there are browser-based tools for creating new presentations. And lest users worry about losing their historic investment in PowerPoint slides, they can be imported into the SlideRocket environment.

It’s not clear yet what, if anything, VMware is going to do about the fact that SlideRocket uses Amazon S3 to store its customers’ physical files.

Terms were not disclosed. SlideRocket raised $7 million in venture funding from Hummer Winblad and Azure Capital Partners. It sells its Pro version for up to 25 users for $24 a user a month. Its enterprise edition for up to 50 users requires a call to the company. The enterprise version is supposed to have enterprise-grade analytics.

There are any number of interpretations floating around about what’s going on here and where it will come out, none of them very satisfying. Gartner VP Chris Wolf, for one, simply thinks that “VMware can’t remain primarily as a platform for Windows applications in an area where Microsoft is a direct competitor. That story always ends the same. So the success of Open PaaS is very strategic to VMware because in my opinion VMware needs a strong application platform to compete against the likes of Microsoft and Oracle long term.”

He’s not sure VMware remains an enabler or turns provider.

VMware doesn’t have any history with open source, aside from a couple of acquisitions, so Cloud Foundry is its first big open source project.

It’s promising the thing will embrace a broad swath of industry-standard frameworks and languages and application infrastructure services to get developers to that unlocked nirvana of portability where they can migrate applications between environments and across cloud providers and enterprise data centers without having to modify the application.

VMware says Cloud Foundry – not to be confused with the Cloud Foundry Amazon deployment tools VMware bought – currently involves a VMware-operated public cloud service, an open source PaaS project, and a novel Micro Cloud PaaS solution. Eventually there’ll be a commercial version of the stuff for the enterprise and the solution provider.

The widgetry is supposed to get the developer out of the business of configuring and patching systems, maintaining middleware and physical machines, and worrying about network topologies by automating all that stuff.

VMware claims its PaaS is different from other people’s PaaS offerings – presumably meaning Microsoft’s Azure and Google’s App Engine – that “restrict developers to a specific or non-standard development framework, a limited set of application services or a single, vendor-operated cloud service,” stuff that raises the dread specter of lock-in by inhibiting or negating application portability.

Instead, Cloud Foundry supports, or will support, frameworks like Spring for Java, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra for Ruby, Node.js and Grails with others promised in fairly short order. And for application services, it will initially support the open source NoSQL MongoDB, MySQL and Redis databases with plans to add VMware’s own vFabric services, the application platform in vCloud, as well as the RabbitMQ messaging system, another VMware property.

In case you’re wondering about the actual platform the apps are supposed run on, Jerry Chen, senior director of cloud and application services, explained that the run-time (that’s the platform) is implied by the language (and so is variable) and that the language is dictated by the kind of app you want to write (web=Ruby, enterprise=Java/Spring, messaging=Node.js). Cloud Foundry will automatically select the right one.

By contrast, Microsoft web applications developed in, say, ASP.NET have to be modified before they can work in Azure, but VMware hasn’t figured out how to accommodate Microsoft developers, at least not yet.

Spring creator Rod Johnson, one of VMware’s own since it bought SpringSource, says, “To date, there hasn’t been a strong, open PaaS destination for Java. The millions of Java developers have largely been left to fend for themselves in the cloud, with weaker options than have been available, to, say, Ruby developers. We’re changing that.”

Cloud Foundry will be closely integrated with existing Spring technologies such as Spring Roo and SpringSource Tool Suite.

Cloud Foundry isn’t tied to any single cloud environment either and apparently doesn’t need a VMware infrastructure to operate.

It’s supposed to support deployment to any public and private cloud environment, including of course those built on VMware’s vSphere like Verizon, Terremark and Savvis and those offered by its vCloud partners as well as non-VMware public clouds like Amazon (complements of RightScale).

VMware anticipates the open source project pushing Cloud Foundry to support Eucalyptus and OpenStack.

The VMware-Operated Developer Service, described as a full-function multi-tenant public PaaS environment designed to be a test bed for new services and operational optimization, is in beta. Invitations can be had at www.CloudFoundry.com.

The company has started CloudFoundry.org to house the open source PaaS project governed, like Spring, by the Apache 2 license.

This quarter sometime, VMware expects to produce the Cloud Foundry Micro Cloud, a free, complete, downloadable instance of Cloud Foundry that runs in a single virtual machine developers can use in the privacy of their own laptop or desktop to ensure that “applications running locally will also run in production without modification on any Cloud Foundry-based private or public cloud.”

Down the road – VMware didn’t say when – there’s supposed to be a commercial Cloud Foundry for enterprises that want to offer PaaS capabilities in their own private cloud and service providers that want to offer Cloud Foundry via their public cloud services.

Enterprises should be able to integrate the PaaS environment with their application infrastructure services portfolio and SPs should be able to offer hybrid cloud environments, migrating to one of VMware’s ~3,500 vCloud partners.

The commercial version will support vFabric application services as well as third-party services. VMware figures that by running on vSphere infrastructure, companies can leverage their existing investments in virtual infrastructure.

It also appears that Cloud Foundry is part of the VMforce cloud VMware is building for Salesforce.com, which is probably why it’s supporting Sinatra, a project heavily financed by the Salesforce-owned Heroku.

The Acadia joint venture oddly appended to the original VCE Coalition is gone, its integration functions transferred to VCE, the company. Acadia’s hallmark professional services seem to have disappeared entirely, gone to partners.

The restructuring is supposed to simplify the way the coalition does business but obviously the old structure didn’t work. The streamlined entity, still a work in progress, is supposed to correct its failing, shushing reseller complaints about Acadian competition and getting a fire lit under sales.

According to VCE chairman and CEO Michael Capellas, “As one entity under a single management structure, VCE can scale more rapidly to meet market demand while ensuring that our efforts are tightly aligned with the needs of our customers and partners.”

VCE reckons its total incremental market opportunity exceeds $100 billion and that its supply chain capacity can support a billion dollars in bookings. With a hundred customers, it’s believed to be operating under that potential.

Once the CEO of Compaq before he sold it to HP, Capellas was originally brought in as CEO of Acadia Enterprises LLC and chairman of the VCE Coalition.

Presumably the old ownership arrangements maintain. The Acadia joint venture was between Cisco and EMC with VMware and Intel as minority investors.

VCE will now do all product development, integration, pre-sales and support. It will move Acadia’s pre-configured Vblock Infrastructure Platforms, concocted out of Cisco’s Intel-based servers and networking, EMC’s storage and security and VMware virtualization, through the 120 resellers the coalition has reportedly assembled and apparently through the Cisco, EMC and VMware sales machines. It will need to wrestle with the implicit channel conflicts.

Acadia was supposed to build, operate and transfer Vblock infrastructure to customers, half of which were expected to be end users, half service providers.

VCE is reportedly abandoning the reference architectures Acadia started with for turnkey SKUs shipped fully configured from factories in Ireland and Massachusetts at fixed prices – not prices negotiated as you go with each of its three parents separately.

There’s now supposed to be an integrated two-year product roadmap and the ability to upgrade system components as they happen from each of the threesome – not way later – as well as code updates at fixed intervals.

Reseller can apparently expect third-party training programs and market development funds.

For its part, VCE has 500 people and is reportedly hiring. Its people are increasingly its own rather than on loan from its parents and it’s supposed to up the number of Centers of Excellence it has globally to show off the widgetry to tire-kicking prospects.

The Post said it got it from “people close to the process” but the paper couldn’t shake the names of either potential buyer out of them only that the deal was at a “sensitive stage,” still three or four weeks away from being signed, and could fall apart at any minute. Both sides of the deal are supposed to close simultaneously.

Well, everyone immediately assumed VMware was the likely buyer of the SUSE piece having tipped its hand when it cut an OEM deal with SUSE recently and the Wall Street Journal waded in late Thursday saying it was VMware and that Novell and VMware still differed on valuation.

If SUSE goes to VMware, which Red Hat figures is its main competitor, is could be a problem for Red Hat and for Microsoft. It certainly levels the technical playing field some.

The Journal offered private equity-backed Attachmate, which sells software to companies with older applications, as maybe getting the rest of Novell including NetWare, the company’s faded and fading network operating system.

The Journal said that not only is price still an issue but so are how to split the sales force, patents and other IP. It repeated what the Post said about how any deals were still weeks away if it doesn’t all come to naught.

Novell, which has around a billion dollars in the bank, rejected Elliott’s $5.75-a-share offer as too low and went off to find an alternative. A tough sell. Buyers haven’t exactly been clamoring at the gate demanding to be let in. According to the Post the Solomon-esque exit will return more than Elliott’s $5.75 a share to stockholders.

Elliott’s unsolicited bid pushed Novell’s burned-out stock price up over an optimistic six bucks a share but with the long wait it has fallen back. After the Journal piece, it closed Thursday at $6.06 for a market cap of $2.13 billion, a lot perkier than it had been before Elliott.

Reuters quoted Brad Zelnick, an analyst at Macquarie Research, as thinking Novell could fetch better than $7 a share, say, about $2.6 billion altogether, a 35% premium to Tuesday’s close, Tuesday being the day before the Post story broke.

Uncertainty over the company’s future has had a negative impact on sales. For the first nine months of its fiscal year Novell earned $56 million on revenues of $605 million.

Some 20 companies were supposed to have expressed at least passing interest in Novell but they were winnowed down and the Journal says there was a bidding round in May but that the “process has dragged on from there.” Novell recently asked for bids for the whole company as well as pieces.

The company claims its new vSphere 4.1 rev sets the bar in virtualization, redefining the economics of computing.

Whether it does or not, come September 1 VMware is changing how it prices its vCenter management solutions, moving to a per-VM licensing model like Amazon instead of its current per-CPU pricing.

The company says users find the new model more logical since it counts the virtual machines under management rather than the physical hardware.

VP of product marketing Bogomil Balkansky claims users’ bills should be a little bit cheaper under the new regime, and simpler to compute. At least they won’t get hit with additional costs for porting computing environments across diverse hardware configurations and multiple CPU scenarios.

VMware has been running a special the last four months to tempt SMBs to vSphere and found that it was making more on the trebled volume than it had under the old price schedule so it’s going to institutionalize the promo price and change its packaging.

There will be a new vSphere 4.1 Essentials kit for small businesses that costs $495, which has proved less of a sticking point than $995. It covers six processors and includes thin provisioning, an update manager, four-way SMP, VCB/vStorage APIs and VC Agent.

VMware is also changing the name of its free ESXi single-server edition to vSphere Hypervisor so it’s not confused with ESX anymore and will include its vMotion migration widgetry in its $583-per-processor vSphere 4.1 Essentials Plus and $995-per-processor Standard editions

The new vSphere upgrade expands VMware’s memory management boundaries as well as its resource pooling capabilities, developments that are supposed to accelerate the evolution of data centers and service providers into cloud computing environments.

It says 4.1 can get up to 25% better application performance and 10%-15% better consolidation ratios complements of new memory compression technology. Increased consolidation translates into lower cost-per-application.

It’s also promising five times faster vMotion virtual machine migrations, enabling up to eight concurrent vMotion events per host pairs instead of two. That too means better performance and availability.

vSphere 4.1 has been endowed with granular controls that dynamically allocate storage and network resources to VMs based on business priority rather like the company’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) manages compute resources across vSphere clusters and pools. Administrators can set quality of service priorities per virtual machine.

The widgetry introduces new storage APIs for array integration so the storage folks can tightly integrate, which should increase the efficiency and performance of the platform in cloud environments too.

VMware has also expanded its management portfolio with the Ionix gear it got from parent company EMC. Ionix Application Stack Manager and Ionix Server Configuration Manager are now called vCenter Configuration Manager, which is supposed to ensure policy-based compliance and sidestep configuration drift by automating manual configuration tasks across virtual and physical servers and workstations.

Meanwhile, Ionix Application Discovery Manager has become vCenter Application Discovery Manager for mapping application dependencies to accelerate data center moves, planning infrastructure consolidations and virtualizing business-critical apps.

VMware said per-VM licensing will take effect in September for vCenter AppSpeed, Chargeback and Site Recovery Manager and in late 2010, early 2011 for CapacityIQ.

Application Discovery Manager and Configuration Manager are priced per virtual machine managed with base configurations typically starting at $50,000.

VMware claims 170,000 customers and 84% of all the virtualized apps in the world. According to Gartner, Red Hat, which now sees VMware as the horse to beat and its chief rival, is still a niche player.

As a result Google is going to support some of the Java tools VMware got with its acquisition of SpringSource, enough so users can move relatively painlessly between Google’s cloud, any VMware-based clouds like, say, its VMForce cloud combine with Salesforce, and Amazon’s EC2. It will also make certain adjustments in the Google Web Toolkit to oblige the effort.

See, Google is cultivating its yen for the enterprise and claims that its App Engine, its platform for web applications, is now ready to support customers’ internal apps so it announced a version called App Engine for Business that big companies are supposed to use as infrastructure.

Its shiny new alliance with VMware plays to this card – supposedly removing fears of lock-in – and Google is kicking in a 99.9% (Three9s) SLA, SSL security and MySQL, a shift away from the vaunted Google BigTable that many users find way too proprietary as well as hard to use.

App Engine for Business is currently in preview and will cost $8 per user per application a month. General availability is slated for later this year,

Then where there are clouds there has to be storage and in that respect Google’s cloud, which isn’t all that much of a cloud yet, is starting to look a lot like Amazon.

Its newfangled beta Google Cloud Storage, which integrates with its App Engine, is initially free and when it goes GA should be priced to compete with S3 with base storage set at 17 cents a gigabyte a month, uploads at 10 cents a gigabyte, downloads at 15 cents a gigabyte in the Americas and EMEA and 30 cents in Asia-Pac with requests a penny a 1,000 (Put, Post, List) or 10,000 (Get, Head).

It’s called the first mission-critical deployment environment for enterprise Java apps in the cloud. It’s still in the oven though and won’t be available as developer preview until later this year when pricing will be announced.

This “enterprise” cloud will be called VMforce and will ride on Salesforce’s Force.com platform. The two companies say they’re both going to sell and support the thing, targeting the six million-odd Java developers that are supposed to be out there, including the two million-odd developers using the Spring framework, and get them building so-called Cloud 2 apps that are social – or at least collaborative – and work on any mobile device like the iPad in real-time.

They say VMforce will “dramatically simplify how enterprises and enterprise Java developers can harness the economics of cloud computing without compromising the flexibility, control and choice they require.”

According to a canned statement attributed to VMware CEO Paul Maritz, “Companies are looking for solutions that deliver the benefits of cloud computing while leveraging existing resources, expertise and infrastructure. By creating a dramatically simplified solution for modern application development, VMforce is a significant step forward in offering our customers a path that bridges existing internal investments with the resources and flexibility of the cloud.”

VMforce is supposed to support standard Java code, such as plain old Java objects (POJOs), Java Server Pages (JSPs) and Java servlets, through the Spring Framework. Java apps built with Spring promise to be easy to port to VMforce and vice versa. VMforce is supposed to make them scale automatically.

It’s also supposed to be global and obviously provide a vSphere-based virtualization platform as well as orchestration and management technology, a relational cloud database, a development platform and collaboration services, application run-time, development framework and tooling.

Naturally Red Hat, which wants to compete with VMware, thinks JBoss is a better app development platform for the cloud, that it is easier, seamless, has a broader user base, and a broader range of apps can be developed.

VMforce will use the Spring Framework and the Eclipse-based SpringSource Tool Suite. VMforce apps will run on the tc Server run-time, the enterprise version of Apache Tomcat, the lightweight application server that’s supposed to optimized for virtual and cloud environments.

As part of Force.com, the apps will have access to Salesforce’s newfangled Chatter Services, its Facebook-like collaboration widgetry. And as part of Force.com, developers will have access to its pre-built business services that can be configured into their apps without any custom coding, stuff like search, identity and security, workflow, reporting and analytics, a Web Services integration API and mobile deployment.

VMware’s vCloud technology is supposed to automatically manage the software stack that powers VMforce applications. It’s called the Java applications’ onramp to the cloud, automating their wiring to the Force.com database and managing the underlying vSphere virtualization platform.

They position VMware as a server virtualization company with little skill or interest in the desktop that’s using View, its desktop virtualization product, as a “sweetener to sell server virtualization” and screwing up the customer and the VDI market in the process.

Poor experience with View has purportedly led to stalled VDI implementations and failed pilots so to remove this ostensible logjam that’s delaying the widespread adoption of the virtual desktop Microsoft and Citrix are offering a Cash for Clunkers-style deal officially called Rescue for VMware VDI.

Users covered by Microsoft’s Software Assurance program can trade in 500 VMware licenses for Citrix XenDesktop and Microsoft VDI Suite and use the stack for free for the next year. By then, they reason, companies should have figured out their desktop strategy.

Citrix and Microsoft have also concocted a VDI Kick Start program to tempt users new to VDI to try their stuff first by cutting the price of XenDesktop VDI Edition and Microsoft VDI Suite Standard Edition to $28 a user for the first 250 user for a year or a total of $7,000, roughly a 50% discount.

The user gets Hyper-V, App-V and System Center virtual machine manager; and the XenDesktop delivery solution with its HDX high-definition user experience and image management for optimizing storage and the ability to use any device, anywhere, LAN or WAN.

And just to make certain it’s driving its point home, come July 1, the beginning of its fiscal year, Microsoft will be canceling those separate, arcane, headache-inducing $23-a-desktop-a-year VECD or Virtual Enterprise Centralized Desktop licenses it’s demanded of its Software Assurance customers to access their Windows operating system in a VDI environment.

They’ll also get full roaming rights so they can use their desktops from any device anywhere without paying for each and every widget.

Starting this summer virtual access – even complements of VMware – will be a “Software Assurance benefit.” Unless you’re using thin clients that haven’t paid the Windows tax; if you’re running thin clients or aren’t covered by a Software Assurance plan the best you can expect is a few bucks off the price; instead of $110 a year per device, it’ll be $100.

Microsoft has also fiddled with the Windows XP Mode on Windows 7 Professional and up so it’s no longer dependent on the virtualization technology in the desktop’s chip. It was altogether too confusing, Microsoft admits, and made it hard for people to run their old XP programs on the new operating system, suggesting it could be holding back some Windows 7 upgrades.

Citrix also come away with a new technology deal with Microsoft though it won’t be making any money off of it, well, not directly. Microsoft is going to use the high-definition HDX technology in Citrix XenDesktop to enhance and extend the RemoteFX widgetry that’s supposed to turn up in Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1, whenever that happens. The Citrix widgetry, however, won’t turn up in the thing until six months after the service pack ships.

RemoteFX, the graphics acceleration for virtual desktops Microsoft got when it bought Calista Technologies and its Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) improvements in 2008, is supposed to make using a virtual desktops and applications an utterly local-style, rich 3D, multimedia experience.

According to independent desktop virtualization maven Brian Madden the RemoteFX-HDX tie-up will make XenDesktop, most of whose deployments are on VMware ESX, more beholden to Hyper-V and give XenDesktop a real reason to run on Hyper-V. Madden figures VMware is working on a PC-over-IP retort.

Microsoft also means to fiddle with the Dynamic Memory in the Service Pack so users can adjust the memory of a guest virtual machine on-demand and maximize server hardware.

Taking advantage of the opportunity, Citrix announced a new version of its desktop widgetry XenDesktop 4 Feature Pack 1.

The new release, available March 24, builds on recently announced XenDesktop scalability enhancements, enabling customers to host 100,000 shared virtual desktops concurrently from a single location, shortens virtual desktop and application log-on times up to 5x and simplifies application management by incorporating all the capabilities of the recently announced XenApp 6 as an integrated feature, including seamless new integration with Microsoft App-V and support for Windows Server 2008 R2.

Presumably they took the name from the ancient Greeks who used the word to mean a refuge or idyllic place and not the uprooted and deported North American Acadia captured in Longfellow’s magnificent tear-jerker “Evangeline,” although Cisco’s new enemies IBM and HP may try to persuade users that it is.

Anyway, Cisco, EMC and VMware – with at least the encouragement of their silent partner Intel – have also formed what they call the Virtual Computing Environment coalition to push on-premise and hosted private cloud computing created out of Cisco’s Intel Xeon-based Unified Computing Systems (UCS) and networking, EMC’s storage and security and VMware’s virtualization to large accounts and service providers through third parties.

The coalition, which will claim more of their resources, talent and investment than the joint venture, will consist of an ecosystem of VARs, service providers, channel partners and ISVs and to start includes the big system integrators Accenture, Capgemini, CSC, Lockheed Martin, Tata Consulting Services and Wipro.

It’s supposed to advance Cisco’s fortunes in the data center against IBM and HP, both of which are ticked at Cisco’s temerity in daring to try to break into servers – and neither is likely to be any happier with this alliance. Their only consolation may be that Cisco’s boxes haven’t gotten a ringing endorsement from users – at least not yet.

What they might like even less, however, is EMC CEO Joe Tucci’s contention that no one company can deliver everything that’s needed in this leg of technology and that he and his mates have a major leg up on the kind of collegiality that will be needed going forward, the kind of partnership that – according to Cisco CEO John Chambers – “will change the data center and the cloud forever.”

The three companies are going to be pooling their roadmaps and sharing and relinquishing control of their most sacred customer information to each other. And Chambers said the “leap of faith” involved in such a situation “begins at the top,” adding “I trust Joe with my life.” Chambers, by the way, once worked for Tucci and their relationship goes back decades.

McKinsey estimates that the market they’re shooting for will be worth $85 billion by 2015, or 20% of worldwide spending on data center infrastructure and services.

Acadia is characterized as an accelerator for users that want to get out of the blocks fast. It and the coalition are going to peddle and support what are called Vblock infrastructure packages – integrated, tested, validated, ready-to-grow configurations of the quartet’s virtualization, networking, computing, storage, security and management technologies.

The companies say that early Vblock customer trials have delivered up to 40% reductions in the cost of operating and managing virtualized data center infrastructures, a major come-on.

The first kits out the door this quarter from third parties include a mid-range Vblock 1 and a high-end Vblock 2. An entry-level Vblock 0 is due next year.

Vblock 2 supports 3,000-6,000 virtual machines and is built out of Cisco’s UCS boxes and Nexus 1000v and Multilayer Directional Switches (MDS); EMC’s Symmetrix V-Max storage and RSA security; and VMware’s vSphere platform.

Vblock 1 supports 800-3,000 virtual machines and uses EMC’s CLARiiON storage.

Vblock 0, when it gets here, will support 300-800 virtual machines and use EMC’s Unified Storage. It will target medium-sized businesses, small data centers or organizations and be used for test and development by channel partners, systems integrators, service providers, ISVs and customers.

Pricing on Vblock, which won’t brook any substitutions of outside hardware or software, is hard to pin down because each account will be different but will range from hundreds of thousands to many millions of dollars.

The companies said the widgetry can scale with additional computer and storage claiming that’s a key differentiator compared to other people’s monolithic systems.

Their calling card will be virtualization because it’s the hinge on which the whole door swings. VMware CEO Paul Maritz says that the triumvirate is also working to ensure that users can get out of the cloud as well as into it. It’s not meant to be, as the song says, the Hotel California from which there is no escape.

EMC has also come up with Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager for Vblock, which is designed to support a wide range of enterprise management consoles. EMC’s RSA security is layered on the Vblock architecture for policy management of identity, data and infrastructure but doesn’t mean the customer has to reduce the security software it already has in place.

The companies mean to bring out other Vblock packages including virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

Chambers said the companies are working on “seven or eight things,” but identified none of them.

Besides pre-sales, the coalition will hawk a bunch of professional services including a Cloud-based Business Advisory Service, Private Cloud Strategic Impact Advisory Service, Private Cloud Architecture Impact Advisory Service, Virtual Desktop Advisory Service, Cloud Computing Strategy Service, and Vblock Design and Implementation Service.

Acadia, meanwhile, is supposed to build, initially operate and ultimately transfer Vblock infrastructure to the customers, half of which are likely to be end users and half service providers.

The engagements – and they’re only talking about a “modest number” of accounts that want to get up fast – should run from 18 months to three years. The companies see Acadia as something of a knowledge repository, heavy on white papers, and training. There will be problem re-creation labs. It should begin customer operations in Q1. It reportedly has no signed contracts yet.

The infrastructure-as-a-service Acadia venture will have its own CEO but the companies haven’t picked him yet. They’re recruiting. Otherwise Acadia will consist of 130 people described as the trio’s “top talent.”

The companies aren’t explaining how much was or will be invested in the venture or by whom only that EMC and Cisco are the principals.

The coalition’s management is more amorphous. Supposedly the three CEOs are running it; more practically they’ve delegated their senior lieutenants to see it thrives day-to-day, folks like Howard Elias and Pat Gelsinger and in turn Dennis Hoffman at EMC, Gary Moore and Rob Lloyd and in turn Manjula Talreja at Cisco and Brian Byun at VMware. This bears watching to see how it shakes out since there’s no real quarterback.

Where EMC’s Atmos cloud widgetry may or may not fit in the grand scheme of things is unclear.

Based on broad hints from the companies, which were already joined at the hip, the Wall Street Journal got wind of the joint venture in September and said it was code named Alpine. They’ve reportedly been working on it for the last three-and-a-half years, intently the last six months.

It intends to surround the Xen hypervisor with a complete runtime virtual infrastructure platform that virtualizes storage, server and network resources. It’s supposed to be agnostic about virtual machines and run VMware’s, which currently run only on its own infrastructure.

The announcement will be made Monday in VMware’s own house at the kickoff of the VMworld conference in San Francisco where VMware is expected to show off its new vCloud Express.

In varying degrees Oracle, HP, Intel, Novell, Dell, Fujitsu, AMD, NetApp, Juniper Networks, Eucalyptus Systems and GoGrid are backing the effort to realize a complete open source cloud-optimized Xen virtual infrastructure platform with easy interoperability between enterprise internal clouds and the external clouds like Amazon and Rackspace.

The platform promises the security, availability, performance and isolation across both private and public clouds that the enterprise demands.

Service providers are expected to use the Xen Cloud Platform, with its promise of no vendor lock-in, to deliver customizable multi-tenant cloud services that are supposed to work seamlessly with the virtualized application workloads customers are running in their internal data centers and private clouds. The applications will need no modification.

Citrix, the VMware wannabe, has contributed its already free XenServer to the cause, which will be orchestrated – at least nominally – under the re-chartered Xen.org.

It is also throwing in proprietary Citrix code such as XenMotion, which moves virtual machines from server to server without service interruption for zero-downtime server maintenance and balances available compute power within a pool of physical servers.

The widgetry includes server pooling and multi-server management, shared storage, dynamic data center provisioning, snapshots and it proprietary virtual switch.

Simon Crosby, the former CTO of XenSource, which Citrix acquired in 2007, and now the CTO of Citrix’ Virtualization and Management Division, expects Oracle and Novell to make “substantial contributions” but didn’t say what.

Red Hat, of course, is pursuing a contrary path with the KVM hypervisor.

Crosby figures KVM is four years behind. It isn’t a product yet, merely a “technology without a whit of infrastructure,” he said and taking another crack at Red Hat warns that open source in its hands – with the changes it makes – effectively becomes proprietary code.

The new XCP widgetry is supposed to see standards-based virtual appliances that can be moved between public and private clouds; a federated compute capacity that simplifies moving application workloads between virtual data centers and disparate cloud service providers; standardized virtualization management; rich virtual networking capabilities providing per-tenant network management, intrusion detection, firewalling, routing and load balancing; and cloud-scale virtual storage so virtual machines and their physical storage can be widely separated without disrupting application performance.

The project will not include independent new management and orchestration offerings in the expectation that existing ones or those in development will suffice.

There’s supposed to be a stable, well-defined public API.

Crosby says the Burton Group rates the scope of the product to VMware’s VSphere 4, a comparison that can’t be made using Microsoft’s widgetry, which lacks the features. First fruits are expected sometime in Q4.

Xen has already amassed a following. According to Crosby’s count, 20% of the public clouds are built on it now and 10% of the Fortune 500 and Global 2000 are using it internally. It gets 10,000 downloads a week.

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