So given VMware's vision of End-User Computing, what will the enterprise look like five years from now?

"Windows will still be around," Soltero says. "But the way in which you access Windows applications and anything related to your traditional desktop computing will be completely different. You won't be accessing your desktop and its mouse and the whole business through a tablet. You might just have the relevant user interface components of the device you'll be using transmitted directly to the device."

"We'll build a better bridge," he adds. "Five years from now, you will hopefully have closer parallels to the consumer experiences for things like file sharing and communication in the enterprise. You'll see that significantly closer to the things that have been successful in the consumer world."

"And you'll see a different relationship between users and IT," he says. "Today, in the potentially contentious process of consumerizing IT or delivering on this post-PC era, often ITÂ?for perfectly understandable reasonsÂ?is kind of the gatekeeper and denier of things rather than the enabler of things. My hope is that we'll see less of this shadow IT. Instead, IT will have developed the processes and partnered with the right technology companies to enable this different interaction with its users. To me, that's a foregone conclusion. It has to happen."