Is imitation the best form of flattery, even in business? This question sprang to mind last week when VMware's private-cloud initative, known as "Project Redwood" internally, accidentally made it into the limelight when by mistake details of vCloud Service Director, which is what VMware's decided to call the Project Redwood technologies, appeared on the company's Web site.

The product was/is to be launched in September, at the company's VMworld event.

But when reading about the presentation deck that was erroneously posted, and then hurriedly taken down, I couldn't help think I'd heard before somewhere some of what vCloud Service Director claim to be able to do.

And then it came to me. Of course I had heard it before! I had heard it at our very own conference, at Cloud Expo New York last month in the Jacob Javits Convention Center. It's just that I didn't hear it from VMware, I heard it from the CEO of Abiquo, who was keynoting at the Jacob Javits, on Day Three of the conference.



Pete Malcolm (pictured above), the CEO in question, was in New York explaining how his own company's offering could make moving between clouds more seamless.

Abiquo's specialty is Cloud infrastructure management solutions and Malcolm himself is the inventor of the term “Resource Cloud”, a concept which provides complete separation between physical infrastructure providers and virtual enterprise consumers, with substantial benefits to both.

In his keynote the defining moment probably of the whole 45 minutes came when Malcolm showed how Abiquo's solution could move workloads seamlessly from VMware to Microsoft's Hyper-V. And sitting in the keynote room, actually just in front of his own Abiquo team of engineers, was a group of VMware engineers!

I can't help wondering if perhaps Abiquo's keynote at Cloud Expo might have sharpened VMware's desire to make moving from private to public clouds easier.

What do you think? Is David stealing a march on Goliath? What other Cloud start-ups are out-pacing the giants? In what layers of the Cloud ecosystem?