With the competition for Vmware set to make big leaps in the future with VRT and other such technologies that will be supported via hardware, Vmware is looking to expand their own horizons. In a press released today, Vmware announced an alliance between themselves and various hardware/software vendors called the "Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Alliance". The "Alliance" will have a focus on creating virtual desktop products of various sorts, and the grouping includes IBM, HP, Hitachi, NEC, Sun and many others. The goal of Vmware is pretty clear, and is just about the same goal that everyone going towards virtualization has.
"Just as the Web has transformed many applications into a hosted service, virtualization is transforming the entire desktop into a server hosted environment that is always on, dynamically scalable and centrally secured and managed," said Brian Byun, vice president of products and alliances at VMware.
With big players like IBM on one side, Microsoft on another, and companies like AMD and Redhat on yet another, I have a feeling that virtualization will probably be the biggest thing to change the desktop and server environments we know of in the next few years, and will probably have a much larger impact than 64-bit computing or dual-core desktop processors did.