The data-storage and virtualisation company's chief executive Joe Tucci talks about four technologies that are shaking up the industry

EMC chief executive Joe Tucci has named what he views as the next big things in IT, as part of his vision for where both the IT world and his company are headed over the next few years.

In his keynote address on Monday at EMC World 2009 in Orlando, Tucci said that the influential techologies would be virtual datacentres, cloud computing, virtual clients and virtual applications.

After the keynote, Tucci took part in a press question-and-answer session where he talked about these technologies and clarified a few points — especially the difference between cloud computing and virtual applications, as EMC sees it. The data-storage specialist owns VMware, the virtualisation market leader, and has released its own virtualisation-related products.

Here's a summary of each of these four, in terms of how EMC is defining them.

Virtual datacentre
EMC believes that all servers will be virtual servers, eventually. However, Tucci does not see everything moving to the cloud. When he talks about the virtual datacentre, he is talking about the on-premises datacentre.

He sees that private datacentre virtualising all of its servers' workloads, and then being able to move some of those workloads to the cloud. But EMC still sees 80 percent of the workloads remaining in private datacentres behind the corporate firewall.

While Tucci sees the whole thing becoming virtualised, he acknowledges that while that transition is accelerating, it is still going to take years, even internally at EMC itself. "Our plan is to virtualise everything, but we're still a long way from that goal," he said.

Cloud computing
Cloud computing means different things to almost everyone who talks about it, but the general idea is usually software and applications delivered over the internet.

However, when EMC talks about cloud computing, it is referring to the backend infrastructure that runs those applications.

Specifically, EMC sees a future in which cloud computing represents the service providers' datacentres — completely virtualised and available to serve a variety of specialised applications on demand. It views these cloud-computing datacentres as connected to private datacentres via VMware products, so virtualised server workloads can go back-and-forth between the two.

Virtual clients
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) has been a hot topic in 2009, because VDI is being evaluated by a lot of companies that are looking to simplify and reduce the cost of deploying and managing end-user systems.

However, VDI is simply a thin-client solution where a user's client system is a virtualised desktop that is delivered to an inexpensive, scaled-down piece of hardware the size of a cable modem. VMware's vision of the virtual client goes far beyond that. It is called VMware View and it includes VDI as well as user access to the virtual machine from a standard laptop or desktop. It also includes Thinapp for de-coupling applications from the OS and a variety of management tools that allow IT departments to roll out, monitor and manage virtual clients.

The future road map of VMware View also includes smartphone access.

Virtual applications
Defining 'virtual application' can be tricky. Is it an application delivered in a web browser? Is it an application delivered from virtualised servers? Is it something like VMware Thinapp that is not tied to the OS? Currently, it could be any or all of those things.

For the future, EMC's vision of a virtual application is a self-contained piece of software that is wrapped in its own minimal (virtually unnoticeable) OS and delivered as a virtual workload that can easily move across various types of platforms. Naturally, this would hasten the trend of the operating system becoming less relevant to the average user.

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