[jamie]

Excluding the graphics company, it sounds like they're trying to build out an application suite that makes it easy to keep firing up new vmware nodes as you grow.

My guess is what you're seeing is the slow buildout of a platform to provide the enterprise with it's own app store.

Think about it this way: what's a huge risk to VMWare's business? Customers deciding that moving applications and infrastructure to the cloud because the scaling and uptime requirements are too expensive to do in house.

Every company that moves their Exchange mailboxes to Google Apps is a lost VMWare customer.