VMware has attended a couple of events lately where company officials shed some light about the way they see how the cloud, and how user virtualization ties in to the social enterprise today, as well as  discussing the impact these factors will make in the future.

Tim Young, VMware’s vice president of social enterprise who joined the company from Socialcast after the merger, talked about this topic at GigaOM’s NetWork 2011 gathering. He mentioned the firm’s position on discovering new social enterprise solutions, and the three principles were the following:

“It will be deployed on virtual infrastructure.

It will be built on a Platform-as-a-service (i.e. Cloud Foundry).

It will be deeply social.”

He also brought up a fourth element, simplicity, which was the core of an earlier social media venture of his which saw a surprising amount of growth.  He applied the same concept to Socialcast, an initiative that resulted in 88 percent active employee participation among his customers, Young said.

He went on to discuss the ‘deeply social’ part of VMware’s vision, which, when combined with the simplicity he mentioned earlier, can turn into an important internal data stream that can be analyzed and used to gain important insight.

A number of VMware execs covered similar grounds during a keynote in Sydney, though the emphasis was more on the direct advantages of cloud and user virtualization in the modern workspace.   VMware has been looking to gain an edge in this space for a while now via a number of different initiatives including the expansion of the VMware Ready Program in June.  The competition has been intensifying all the while, and Citrix is making the most of its head start in this space.