"In an ideal world, no longer do we need to order some specialized hardware, then hire a consultant to install it and program the device in its specialized language," he adds. "Instead, we'll simply define an application and all of the resources that it needs, including all of its compute, storage, networking and security needs, then group all of those things together to create a logical application. There's work ahead, but I see the Software-Defined Data Center as enabling this dramatic simplification."

As enumerated by VMware, the SDDC has five core tenets:

As Maritz prepares to move on from the company he has shepherded for the past four years, VMware has begun to deliver on this vision. On Monday, it , integrating the company's virtualization, cloud infrastructure and management portfolio in an integrated suite intended to deliver the SDDC.

On the applications side, Maritz's vision encompasses a dramatic change in the way organizations build, run and deliver enterprise applications. This vision too, depends on cloud.