Virtualization kingpin VMware, Inc. on Tuesday laid out its enterprise mobile vision, roadmap and partnerships for what VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger calls “business mobility.”

“The IT environment is about bridging two worlds of cloud and the local client/server environments to enable business mobility as a new model of IT,” said Gelsinger in an event held at the Press Club in San Francisco. “IT is looking for three main trends for their businesses: instant, fluid and secure.”

At the heart of the announcement was the launch of VMware’s Identity Manager, a simple single sign on and enterprise secure identity management initiative that’s part of its Application Configuration for Enterprise (ACE).  ACE was launched intitally with Box, Inc., DocuSign, Inc., Salesforce.com, Inc. and AT&T.  As part of the announcement, VMware added 15 new partners that have committed to standardizing public applications and development in the enterprise with ACE.

“Business Mobility is more than a shift in technology; it is an opportunity for true business process transformation,” said Sanjay Poonen, executive vice president and general manager of end-user computing at VMware. “Business Mobility will be a key driver of economic value for the next decade – truly reorienting businesses around mobile innovation, apps and services. As a result, the adage ‘adapt or perish’ has never been truer than it is today.”

VMware promises to do away with complexity for mobile workers just as the existing identity management component of its desktop virtualization has done in virtual workspaces. The new service is based on the same technology, the authentication software that the company obtained through its acquisition of TriCipher Inc. in 2010, but layers five years worth of improvements on top.

VMware Identity Manager automatically checks the credentials provided by an employee against the details in their organization’s user directory on behalf of applications without requiring any manual input. That reduces the amount of work involved in accessing service to the initial verification.

VMware said that the single sign-on functionality works with popular cloud-based tools such as Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce.com as well as its own infrastructure-as-a-service platform. Much like alternatives, it’s offered as part of its broader enterprise mobility suite, which will help make the package more attractive to organizations looking for a one-stop-shop to address their needs.

That excludes those that only require a single-sign on solution, but that’s an acceptable sacrifice given that authentication is merely a part of VMware’s broader mobile strategy rather than a competitive focus in and of itself. Customers will be able to consume Identity Manager as a cloud service or deploy it on their own infrastructure, an option that will no doubt receive extra attention given the earlier security developments in the login management space this week.

VMware teased out their vision and product plans for new capabilities with the combination of NSX and Airwatch for security in the hybrid cloud.

Video of Launch with VMware Sanjay Poonen @spoonen 

VMware’s Pat Gelsinger was interviews on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE at the recent EMC World conference. Watch the interview with John Furrier and Dave Vellante (31:23)

John Furrier contributed to this report.

photo credit John Furrier @furrier