“The Dawn of a New Era”.  That was the slogan that Intel used 30 years ago when they introduced the x86 processor.  And very fitting today for me as I start out a new era in the x86 virtualization space.  Last week I started working at VMware as a Solutions Consultant on the Global Accounts team.  This means that I will be responsible for selling the VMware virtualization solutions to a hand full of very large companies.

While I was talking to VMware about this position, I was impressed with how far they have taken the virtualization technology.  I was one of the 60,000 people who downloaded Workstation 1.0 during the first two months when it was released back in the Spring of 1999.  It was amazing with regards to what it could do back then.  But the magic wore off for me eventually; for most of last year I was using it to run my “work laptop” as a VM on my personal laptop at my previous job (the reason being that my personal laptop was a hell of a lot more powerful than what my employer gave me).  The magic had turned into rock solid technology, it did what it was supposed to and did it well.

But then I started to learn about the management and automation technologies that VMware has built and aquired over the past few years.  With my recent work within software development organizations at Fortune 100 companies, I immediately knew all the benefits to application development teams.   And when I saw a demonstration of Lab Manager, I was in awe once again with the magic.  Being able to run and test a multi-computer software configuration through a web browser and then saving a state of those machines as a bug…that is amazing.  And that is just one of the management/automation tools.

I feel that virtualization currently is and will continue to be the most transforming technology for enterprise computing for the rest of this decade.  That is the reason I decided to join VMware.  So, expect to see more and more postings here in the labs on virtualization moving forward.  Of course, everything I write here will continue to be my own opinion and not that of VMware.

Now, that doesn’t mean that I’m giving up my focus on some of the other technology areas that I have been focusing on lately (i.e., SaaS, Web2.0, Social Computing).  I will still be keeping an eye on many things in those areas and writing about them as time permits.  There are still experiments in the works at the lab…