Slideshow: Amazon's Case For Enterprise Cloud Computing
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VMware CEO Paul Maritz said virtualized applications now account for more than half of new applications installed and in the future, a growing share of the data center will be managed through the new layer of virtualization software. Virtualization implementers will gain additional capital expense savings, but they will plow them back into creating updated applications, designed to run on the private cloud and able to provide near real time services to end users.

"Data center managers are realizing this time they can't just renew the infrastructure. They must renew the applications as well. They can't be stuck with old, batch oriented code," Maritz said in a meeting with the press immediately following his keynote address to VMworld today.

VMware is positioning itself as the supplier of a framework for quickly rebuilding Java applications that will then run on a VMware-based, private cloud environment managed by an expanded portfolio of VMware software. VMware acquired SpringSource last year, builder of the popular Spring framework for lightweight Java applications. Maritz said Ruby on Rails applications can be used just as well. He described future application development as taking place on the VMware Cloud Application Platform, starting with the Spring Framework.

VMware put more product muscle behind its claim to be the future data center operating system. As additions to its core vSphere 4 virtual machine management system, VMware is adding vCloud Director. VCloud Director will manage a private cloud inside the enterprise, giving business users the ability to self-provision and allowing the IT manager to create pools of virtual resources -- servers, storage and networking -- with policies governing each pool as its own virtual data center.