Some organizations seem to be moving in this direction. Maritz said that there are now over 800,000 vSphere administrators, including 68,000 certified in handling the technology.

"I spent my whole life working on the PC," admitted Maritz, who is 56. The metaphor of the desktop came from Xerox Parc research lab in the 1970s, which at the time, was exploring "how to automate the life of the white collar worker, circa 1975," he said. This meant the researchers made computer based approximations of the tools of the office worker--file cabinets, typewriters, files, folder, inboxes and outboxes.

"We got a great a desktop environment," he said. "The problem is the people under the age of 35 don't sit behind desks, and they don't spend all of their time lovingly tending to documents. They will be dealing with streams of information that will be coming at them in much smaller chunks and much larger numbers. We're moving into a new post-document era, and we will need different solutions."

Maritz then explained how VMware's products can provide a foundation for this new type of operation. VMware's vFabric for developers to build applications that can run natively in the cloud. CloudFoundry provides a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that customers can use to run their own applications on external hardware. VMware View VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) software allows users to access their data and applications across a wide range of clients. And the recently released VMware Horizon provides an enterprise portal for users to easily access new applications.

The presentation also featured a number of customers moving to build private clouds for their operations. The New York Stock Exchange Euronext stock exchange runs about 2,300 virtual machines in a private cloud configuration. The company uses vSphere, vShield, vCloud Director, and other VMware technology, said executive vice president and chief information officer Steve Rubinow.