Interesting, I’ve been talking to VMware a fair amount and I want them to really sparkle on vCloud not just persist in their virt domination. I’ll watch for your vCloud blog.

Thanks for such a thoughtful and well written response. I think what is missing is that, at least in the enterprise, there won’t be a fragmentation. It’s going to be all VMware all the time. There is still no credible contender to the upcoming vCloud product and I’ve looked at everything in a fair bit of detail now. I say this as someone who would far prefer to see an open standard. Regardless, a de facto standard for enterprise clouds will mean that hosting providers who also use vCloud will have the possibility for very strong integration to internal enterprise clouds. In fact, I have a large blog posting I’m working for just this subject. The real fragmentation you outline will exist more within the public clouds realm than the enterprise.

Interface/API/arch standards are very important to me. That’s why I released the GoGrid API under an open license, which then caused Sun and RackSpace to follow suit. It also inspired a lot of the work on the OCCI (Open Cloud Computing Interface) API.

Absolutely agree with the thrust of your comment, but don’t think these dangers actually exist. Enterprises are going to adopt vCloud. There’s nothing else on the horizon for them. A de facto standard (like the Cisco IOS command line interface) is, practically speaking, as good as any open standard.