It was reported that sometime over the past weekend the number of tweets and blogs about VMworld exceeded Plankk’s limit (postulated by blogger Marvin Plankk, now confined to an obscure institution in an unidentified state with more moose than people), and quietly coalesced into an undifferentiated blob of digital entropy as a result of too many semantically identical postings online at the same time. So this leaves the field clear for me to write the first VMworld post in the new cycle.

This year was my first time at VMworld, and it left a profound impression – while the energy and activity among the 17,000 attendees, exhibitors and VMware itself would have been impressive in any context, the underlying evidence of a fundamental transformation of the IT landscape was even more so. The theme this year was “clouds,” but to some extent I think themes of major shows like this are largely irrelevant. The theme serves as an organizing principle for the communications and promotion of the show, but the technology content of the show, particularly as embodied by its exhibitors and attendees, is based on what is actually being done in the real world. If the technology was not already there, the show might have to find another label. Keeping the cart firmly behind the horse, this activity is being driven by real IT problems, real investments in solutions, and real technology being brought to market. So to me the revelation of the show was not in the fact that VMware called it “cloud,” but that the world is really thinking “cloud.”