VMware CEO says virtualization will displace the operating system

Thursday, September 02, 2010

In his keynote speech at this year’s VMworld conference, VMware CEO and president Paul Maritz told audience members that virtualization software will displace operating systems.

The theme for this year’s conference was “Virtual Roads, Actual Clouds,” which echoes the buzz that IT vendors have been hearing a lot of in recent years.

Maritz highlighted the journey of cloud computing and said technology has reached a “tipping point” in 2009, when the number of applications running on virtual machines exceeded physical servers for the first time, according to the Seattle Times.

“One of the implications is that there are now more copies of traditional operating systems that no longer see the hardware than those that do,” said Maritz. “This task of mediating access to and coordinating hardware is largely being taken over by a new layer of software - extended virtualization.”

VMware also rolled out a series of new technologies at this week’s VMworld aimed at making it easier for businesses to move information to the cloud and to run their own data centers more efficiently, including vCloud, vShield and the vSphere 4.1.