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Cloud is the foundation of the infrastructure piece of the puzzle in Maritz's view. He believes all infrastructure must be virtualized and delivered as a service, and the control of the data center at the heart must be entirely automated by software: a concept VMware dubs the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC).

The core idea behind the SDDC is extend the benefits of virtualization to every domain in the data center--compute, storage and networking--and the associated availability and security services.

"The Software-Defined Data Center enables us to think even more broadly about the process of provisioning workloads," says VMware CTO Steve Herrod. "The initial phases of virtualization have made it very easy (and affordable!) to spin up virtual machines quite quickly. But when deploying workloads into a production environment, there are so many additional steps as their network identity is created, monitoring probes are installed and security policies are enforced."