VMware has announced that its VMware infrastructure has been named the "Best Overall Cloud Product" and "Best Cloud Platform" at the inaugural Cloud Computing Conference & Expo Show Awards, produced by SYS-CON Events.

All delegates at the 1st International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo in San Jose, California, were offered the opportunity to vote for their favorite cloud computing solutions in five highly competitive categories: Best Overall Cloud Product, Best Cloud Platform, Best Cloud Storage Solution, Best Cloud Management Solution, and Best Cloud Application. The results of the voting by delegates - many of whom are directors of engineering and infrastructure, senior architects, IT directors and managers - were announced recently by SYS-CON Events.

"Thanks to leadership by companies like VMware, virtualization has reshaped IT, creating new service and software models and changing much of the physical computing layer," said Jeremy Geelan, senior vice-president of SYS-CON Media & Events and Conference Chairman. "Cloud Computing is the next transformation. As producers of the Cloud Computing Conference & Expo series, we at SYS-CON Events are thrilled to see that delegates to our inaugural event felt strongly enough about VMware's cloud computing leadership to award it not only the coveted Best Cloud Platform award but also the Best Overall Cloud Product at the show."

"It is an honor to be recognized by IT professionals - the people using our products everyday - for the innovation we're bringing to virtualization that helps facilitate and advance cloud computing," said Dan Chu, vice president of emerging products and markets, VMware. "This award is a great endorsement of VMware's efforts in cloud computing, and affirms our commitment to leading the industry in reliability, performance and cross-platform support."

Since 2001, VMware ESX, as a provider of a virtualization platform for x86 systems, has provided the foundation for more cost-effective, efficient, and flexible datacenters that enable customers to do more with less - and to do it better.

As a core component of VMware Infrastructure 3, the virtualization and management suite, the power of ESX is magnified by VMware's comprehensive toolset that provides centralized management, automatic load balancing, business continuity, power management and much more.

Organizations typically start down the path of virtualization for the immediate cost savings they get from server consolidation using ESX. In so doing, they find that their entire datacenter has become far more flexible, because their compute capacity is now pooled and available on-demand across services. On top of the lowered capital expenses (capex) they get from reducing their hardware needs, they begin to accrue lower operational expenses (opex) as a result of easier datacenter management, reduced power consumption and improved disaster recovery. In short, they have begun to transform their datacenter into an internal or private cloud.

By delivering these compelling capex and opex savings, VMware infrastructure helps to make the revolutionary transition to cloud computing a seamless evolutionary process, with each stage and expanded implementation paying for itself not only with reduced costs but also increased flexibility, efficiency and performance. Consolidation shrinks the footprint of the datacenter to an easier-to-manage, more cost-effective virtual platform. Pooling resources and automating the underlying infrastructure with VMware Infrastructure enables capacity to be distributed on-demand wherever needed. Today, many customers are approaching complete virtualization of their IT environments, and increasingly pooling their virtual servers to work together as a compute layer or fabric, moving them closer in painless, incremental steps to the cloud and all of its benefits.

VMware's vCloud Initiative, an industry-wide effort led by VMware, working closely with service providers, is expected to help this evolution by enabling interoperable and compatible solutions that federate between internal and external, or private and public, clouds to provide additional IT capacity on-demand.

The Cloud Computing Conference & Expo Awards program was launched in November 2008 as a way of recognizing excellence in a fast-moving IT world that is shifting from the traditional single tenant approach to software development to that of a scalable, multi-tenant, multi-platform, multi-network approach.

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