The kind of cloud service that a company requires would largely depend on the scale of their business.  The public cloud is usually for those who seek long-term use and would like to save money on maintaining an infrastructure on their own. The private cloud follows an exact opposite concept. Combining these two gave birth to hybrid cloud—an approach that promotes scalability and cost-effectiveness without having to expose critical apps and data to third party vulnerabilities. This is what VMware continues to explore and offer users.

In a recent interview with VMware CEO Paul Maritz, he made mention of the several public cloud service operating under the VMware stack. He said, “Within that community, what we’ve elected to do is to try and pick a very small subset of [providers] who are committed to have the same suite in their public clouds. So in particular that user interface is going to be common between the two. The way that you describe and secure and manage your workloads will look the same internally versus externally.”

Capitalizing on the cloud computing and storage enthusiasm of the industry, VMware has made several steps to ensure leadership over the competition. The company seemed to be enjoying collaboration on several levels, though this is a competitive tactic amongst cloud vendors. VMware teamed up with SAP to launch an optimized integrated offering that can be employed on Virtustream for software publishing and distribution. This partnership would also enable users to migrate SAP solutions or apps to virtualized infrastructure running under VMware and Hewlett-Packard (HP) roof. In today’s session of HP Discover 2011, VMware and HP are joining forces to upgrade turnkey solutions and simplify and accelerate virtualization for customers via HP Virtual System—built on HP Converged Infrastructure. VMware also continues its shopping spree, this time targeting social media through the purchase of SocialCast. They even outbid one of the strongest forces in the tech world (Google) for a prized Silicon Valley office. VMware also launched its own Salesforce-like app portal management system in mid-May.

With huge efforts to innovate and improve cloud strategy, EMC will really have a hard time letting VMware slip out of their grasp. Aside from a ballooning valuation, VMware is one of the trusted brands in the cloud market and somewhat established as the “go-to guy” of the giants for virtualization and cloud computing.