A year after VMware's successful IPO, virtualization has shifted gears from niche technology to the must-have underpinning for projects ranging from disaster recovery to data backup to desktop application delivery.

It's not surprising, then, that other companies are developing products for the market that VMware has been synonymous with up until now.

So CEO Diane Greene is looking two steps ahead. And what she sees is that server virtualization was only the start. The end destination is a fully automated data center, with x86 virtualization as the lynchpin holding all the various parts together. In this virtual world, applications are built specifically for virtual machines and are moved from virtual to physical systems, regardless of the operating system.

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