The new wave of IT virtualization is certainly driving huge growth for VMware, which has added 1,500 employees so far in 2010. But the important thing to realize is that this is not just a boom for a few companies, says VMware COO Todd Nielsen. “This is an opportunity for everyone at all levels of the stack and for all of our 25,000 customers.”

Interviewed by Wikibon.org CEO David Vellante and SiliconAngle CEO John Furrier on SiliconAngle.TV from VMworld 2010 (www.siliconangle.tv), Nielsen said that the first rule that VMware senior management always keeps in mind is that they are only part of the picture. “The value has to be shared by the whole ecosystem. Making it possible for everybody to add value at every layer of the stack is important.”

Transparency is an important part of that third-party support. VMware needs to keep all the contributors in the stack in the loop of its development direction. While it keeps key parts of its technology proprietary, “I see a big difference between proprietary and secret”. VMware enforces a policy of keeping its technology partners informed of what is in the development pipeline and puts a great deal of effort into developing good, well documented public interfaces, and of releasing those to the development community ahead of time to allow technology partners to develop their products and services in parallel with VMware.

“We don’t want any surprises in the community,” he said. He contrasted that to Apple Computer, which keeps everything secret until it is released, creating constant surprises for third-party developers.

Part of what VMware needs to communicate, both to the developer community and to customers, is its vision. “Virtualization is a cornerstone of what the cloud era will provide,” Nielsen said. “Customers always want services that are easy to use and meet their needs. We are among a few companies with a vision for IT to deliver on those desires.”

The second rule is always to be open to learning from partners, customers, and the market. One good example, he said, is in the licensing model. “We were licensing by the physical server and were very happy with that. But the big cloud service providers wanted us to license on a per virtual machine consumption model to better fit their business needs. We were able to do that.”

The opportunity today is huge, he said, citing the annual Gartner CIO Survey as one indicator of just how fast the virtualization/cloud wave is growing. “In last year’s Gartner CIO survey, cloud computing was number 14 on the list of things CIOs were concerned about. It might as well have been number 100. This year it is number 2. So in a year it went from ‘yeah, whatever’ to ‘Oh My God!’”

But, he emphasized, VMware is in the virtualization business for the long haul. “These are good times, and we are enjoying them. But this era is going to take 10 years to build out. It is very deep computer science, and we have a lead in that and aren’t going to stop.”