At the recent VMworld® Europe 2009 conference, held in Cannes, France on February 24-26, VMware president and CEO Paul Maritz outlined a comprehensive roadmap for the company’s innovative cloud computing strategy. As noted by Maritz in his keynote, this strategy builds on the proven benefits of VMware virtualization technology and will include the following key components:

• VMware vSphere™, the industry’s first virtual datacenter operating system (VDC-OS), which provides the foundation for building internal and external clouds.
• VMware vCloud™, an initiative that gives companies the freedom and flexibility to implement “private clouds” through federation between internal and external clouds.
  
  Unlike other cloud computing solutions, the VMware approach will help allows companies to achieve the benefits of cloud computing in an evolutionary way that supports today’s applications, as well as future applications built on next-generation frameworks such as Ruby on Rails.