What’s with all these startups at VMworld this year? There are a number that are showing up in Las Vegas next week.

Here are five that are catching our eye. We’ll be interviewing executives from some if not all of these companies during our live broadcasts from theCube at VMworld.

Bromium: The San Francisco based start-up has raised $9.2 million in Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners.  It’s in stealth. But I like this blog post from last month:

There’s an infrastructure storm brewing that, when it finally unleashes its fury, will catch off guard every enterprise CIO steadily making progress towards their Private Cloud.  The argument: It’s time to get over our love of Hype(rvisors) and question the value of virtualization in the cloud.    What kind of cloud?  Oh, All kinds.   And lest you want a nutshell summary:  Here is my thesis: The hypervisor as you know it is useful for hosting legacy IT workloads in private clouds.  But beyond today’s Hypervisors, a profoundly important new building block for the cloud will emerge – an even more powerful kind of Hypervisor.

Puppet Labs: DevOps masters in their own right. This Portland company is one of the leading open-source innovators for cloud automation and IT systems management. Last I spoke with them they were developing their products out of the methodologies they have been developing for helping IT create automated systems for managing infrastructure. That’s not such a bad focus as more companies cope with the sprawl and performance issues that can come with deploying and managing virtual machines.

CloudBees: CloudBees helps companies build, test and deploy Java Web applications in the cloud.

Here’s something of note:  MongoHQ, and CloudBees recently announced a partnership that extends MongoDB’s data hosting and services to the Java community. The goal is to help developers easily and efficiently build out and scale the data layer of their Java applications.

BitNami:A company that has quietly won the praise of Amazon Web Services for its ease of use in deploying apps to the cloud. Why are they at VMworld? Automated configurations make sense on platforms. And platforms are a big story this year. We expect VMworld’s CloudFoundry to get quite a bit of buzz at the show. BitNmi fits into that story.

BitNami provides a framework for running open source Web applications and development environments, including Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress, PHP, Rails, Django to name a few.

Piston Cloud:  Another company that is keeping a low profile but has some tech superstars in its ranks. The company launched this year. It is led by chief technical architects from NASA and Rackspace. The service is built around OpenStack. The company seeks to address the security, performance, and lifecycle management issues that arise in hybrid cloud approaches, especially by federating large, complex datasets that have regulatory requirements for authentication and access control.

Services Angle

What do all these startups have in common? They all have a services oriented focus or fit within a services infrastructure. Services are the big story this year.VMworld exemplifies that trend.