Looking forward to VMworld

Prior to any big industry event, I find my voicemail and email inbox full of invitations to the event, to vendors' booths and to private briefings. Although one has to have a finely tuned b.s. detector to be able to ferret out useful information, they're often the best way to meet industry executives, learn the philosophy behind the product or service announcements and, of course, learn about product announcements and updates. Another really useful feature is that these requests give a pretty good view of that the trend lines are in the industry.

Here are the top topics:

• Desktop virtualization - although adoption of this technology has occurred much slowly than server virtualization, it appears to be picking up steam.
• Management of virtualized environments - organizations are quickly learning that managing physical systems and multiple layers of virtualization technology creates a much more complex environment. Suppliers, ever aware of organizational problems and issues, are coming forward with more and more sophisticated tools to address this complexity.
• Security in a virtualized environment - as with management, this area is often ignored until problems arise.  Suppliers are focused on dealing with all of the areas of potential attack virtualized environments have.
• Cloud computing - buzz word heaven. Need I say more?

It will be fun to see what the suppliers launch at this VMworld.