Paul Maritz, the head of EMC virtualization subsidiary VMware, is sticking behind the plan he’s been following, and realizing quite successfully, since leaving Microsoft to join the company.  He’s naturally been among the most prominent advocates of the adoption of the new delivery model driven by cloud and virtualization adoption, and VMware is playing a significant role in this migration for many companies.

“We see fundamental changes in the way technology infrastructure is organized, applications are written and software is consumed. And as a firm, VMWare should be on the right side of the technology tide. We have to deal with these new applications or IT will be left holding the bag,” says Maritz.

VMware is investing in expanding on more than one front, most recently with a couple of end-point developments. The firm rolled out Persona Management to VMware View 5, a function that speeds up login and logout times for virtual desktop deployments. This is achieved by storing profile files and data somewhere in the network; these copied upon login, so only critical files and registry keys are downloaded on the spot. This also speeds up logout thanks to the fact VMware View 5 only copies the files that were modified. Persona Management extends itself beyond this core functionality by enabling admins to use VMware View Composer to manage employees’ profiles.

In addition to the Persona Management update, VMware also released v4.1 of the Fusion desktop virtualization app for Mac recently. The main thing that caught users’ eye was that they could suddenly install client versions of Leopard and Snow Leopard on Lion, despite Apple’s restrictions. This was later revealed as a blunder that will be patched sometime soon.

VMware is expanding its presence in the endpoint, as well as in other areas. Coinciding the Fusion launch was a fresh study by Evans Data that shed some light on Cloud Foundry’s popularity among developers.