Palo Alto’s VMware, Inc. launched its vCloud Integration Manager this week, which the company says is “designed to help service providers automate the delivery and operations of VMware vCloud Director(TM)-based clouds.”

From the announcement:

 --  Accelerate time to revenue: vCloud Integration Manager will be tightly integrated with VMware vCloud Director, VMware vSphere(R), VMware vShield(TM) Edge and VMware vCenter(TM) Chargeback Manager to automate and accelerate the provisioning and delivery of infrastructure and associated services. vCloud Integration Manager  will provide a REST-based API to integrate with a service provider's  back office systems (CRM, billing, etc.), and a Web-based administration portal.                          

--  Simplify operations to increase efficiency and reduce costs: vCloud Integration Manager will include Web-based portals to streamline and automate service plan, customer lifecycle and reseller management.  With the click of a button, service providers will be able to  standardize product configuration and delivery, manage customer lifecycles from sign-up to decommission, and reduce the time and overhead involved in transacting with resellers.

Charles Babcock at InformationWeek, writes that VMware looks as though it is trying to maintain dominance as a virtualization software company by targeting the cloud, as opposed to the data center.

From InformationWeek:

The cornerstone of its network is a set of seven infrastructure-as-a-service providers, each of whom is required to offer enterprise-level cloud services through a VMware-originated API. Each member of the group must be able to provide high availability guarantees as part of its services. Four of them were previously announced: COLT, whose locations include London, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, and Paris; SingTel in Singapore; Bluelock in Indianapolis; and SoftBank in Japan. Three others have been added: Verizon (owner of longtime VMware partner Terremark), Dell, and CSC, the former Computer Sciences Corp.

The group is distinguished by its ability to supply redundant hardware for high availability services and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduling, which allows a user to dynamically move virtualized resources around via automated processes. They must also supply high-performance storage.

Meanwhile, The New York Times posted an interesting conversation with Paul Maritz, VMware’s chief executive, who discussed how the cloud is now one of the three big eras for computing, along with the mainframe, and client-server eras. Maritz also chimed in on the wave of acquisitions in the tech world, and how that might affect this current cloud era.

From The New York Times:

Q: Don’t you worry about consolidation? Some analysts see a time in the near future when just a handful of companies like I.B.M. and Microsoft will control global clouds that handle most of the business computing work.

A: I think there will be tens of thousands of clouds, because they will be so easy to set up. You will be able to buy or rent a portion of someone’s data center and configure it how you want. And cloud won’t be limited to megadata centers. There will be on-premise clouds that are cheap and easy to run. The really hard choices for most businesses will be figuring out which legacy applications they leave in existing computers, which they freeze, and which they move into the cloud.