VMware aims to merge private and public clouds

In an interview last month, VMware's Bogomil Balkansky, director of product marketing, insisted that competing virtualization technologies have not gained enough adoption to make them worth supporting.

"We really have no religion about managing or not managing other hypervisors," he says. "If and when we see a substantial footprint of any other hypervisor, we're open to doing that."

But ultimately, true interoperability will have to include multiple hypervisors, not just VMware's, Bowker says. With cheaper hypervisors available from the likes of Microsoft and Citrix, even customers who swear by VMware may want to use less expensive virtualization platforms for certain purposes, such as application staging, he says.

"It has to have the flexibility to deploy across multiple hypervisors," Bowker says. "Why put a staging environment on expensive virtualization infrastructure"

Still, Wolf says VMware has come a long way in understanding the requirements of joining its virtualization technology to services offered by cloud vendors. The analyst cited the vendor's as well as its latest announcements on cloud interoperability.