"Our customers are standardizing on our cloud infrastructure to not only reduce costs in their data centers, but also to enable their developers with an agile and scalable platform on which to build new applications," says Jerry Chen, vice president of Cloud and Applications Services at VMware. "We've seen a fundamental change in the way our customers are building and running modern applications and the products within the cloud application platform portfolio are designed to address today's application development needs while providing a path to tomorrow.

At the application layer, VMware is counting on a triad of technologies: Cloud Foundry, the open-source Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) project it released under Apache License 2.0 last year; Spring, the open-source Java application development framework; and its recently released vFabric suite, a lightweight, scalable, integrated middleware suite for developing data-intensive custom applications.

In some ways, VMware's answer to the transformation of the access layer brings it full circle to its very beginnings with desktop virtualization. But the vision now extends far beyond the desktop to enable organizations to deliver applications and content to any device in the era. VMware plans to accomplish this with a combination of VMware View for desktop virtualization, Wanova Mirage to provide central management of virtual desktops with local execution, and , an integrated solution for managing devices, applications and data.