After its announcement and unveiling of vCloud last year, VMware has followed things up over the past year with a lot of hard work to move their Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering along and make good on their promise and vision of a world filled with hybrid enterprise clouds.

VMware told the story all along about the “interoperability” they bring to the IaaS table if enterprises run their stack and choose any service provider running vCloud.  While it was a nice story it was not anywhere close to reality, that is until now with the introduction of their vCloud Datacenter Services.  This introduction puts an official stake in the ground on a program focused on interoperability and security in hybrid environments.

Now VMware’s work is not completely done in the IaaS space, but between vCloud Datacenter Services and vCloud Director their IaaS offering comes together and lays the foundation for as enterprises start to move beyond the kicking the tire phase of cloud adoption.

Where the VMware’s future is less certain is in regards to their PaaS and SaaS strategy.

Moving up a level to PaaS, VMware made their acquisition last year of Spring who owns the enterprise Java space with their massively adopted Spring Framework.  Spring brought with them their acquisition of monitoring company Hyperic and Java cloud management platform Cloud Foundry.  VMware seems to have been doing a good hands-off job since the acquisition and letting Spring do their thing.., exhibit A is their acquisition of enterprise grade message queue’ing project RabbitMQ.

While remaining hands-off, VMware has also flexed their presence muscle a bit with setting up a deal with Salesforce for their jointly developed VMforce offering that brings Salesforce down a level in the cloud stack, while giving their large customer base an offering that might entice them to move their custom spring apps under Salesforce’s management.

The VMforce offering is interesting but beyond pre-built Spring stacks, and auto-scaling like functionality at the machine and resource levels they need to continue to evolve things, as well as add other frameworks and developer stacks into the mix.

Last, but certainly not least, in the cloud layers is SaaS.  This is where VMware’s current standing makes little sense unless they push whole-heartedly into the SaaS realm.  Earlier in the year they acquired Zimbra from Yahoo! and lept to the top of the cloud stack touting they would bring new levels of application and virtualization interoperability and gains.  I marked off a Zimbra session at VMworld this year to see what the hubbub was all about and I must say that I was beyond disappointed.

Also anticipated on my end was possibly some more announcements about other SaaS acquisitions or partnerships to bring more offerings to their vCloud Datacenter Services customers.  As it stands now they are a one trick pony which will do little to persuade service providers when hosted Exchange and Sharepoint offerings are wide spread.

I am looking forward to the year ahead from VMware as they continue to evolve their core competencies and look at what Act II will be after the Infrastructure layer.

[Editor’s Note: Photo credits to staff photographers Ricky McGill and Kyle Owen. –mrh]

For VMworld 2010 SiliconANGLE Exclusive Blanket Coverage – GoTO www.SiliconANGLE.tv/channels/VMworld2010

For More Technology ANGLE’s from SiliconANGLE.tv – Visit SiliconANGLE.tv