EWeek has an interview with Paul Martitz where he says the Virtual Data Center OS is the #1 priority for VMware.

Why is VMware focusing so heavily on the cloud, as opposed to updating what it already has or some products that could come out in six months?

Key point to correct there—the cloud is not our only focus.

The three key initiatives are, No. 1, the virtual data center operating system, No. 2, vCloud, No. 3, vClient.

So our key initiative really is the virtual data center operating system, not the cloud. There’s a cloud dimension to it, but our focus is really on how we allow our customers to build upon the technology we already have to strengthen their use of virtualization, to achieve much more fundamentally efficient and flexible usage of their computing infrastructure.

We believe that, in doing so, it will open up opportunities for them to federate with the external cloud, but it starts, first and foremost, with the virtual data center operating system.

VMware’s path to cloud computing is through its virtual data center OS.

On one side you said you have the cloud, and you have the sort of very dynamic data center. What’s the vision that VMware has about pulling all of these different things together?

First and foremost, we believe our customers need to have a way whereby they can essentially start using their internal resources as a giant computer and, in doing so, get maximum efficiency and flexibility out of it.

Now, they can’t afford to rewrite all of their applications to do that, and the only strategy, really, to reach for that state is through increased use of virtualization. As we do that, though, we have to make sure that that strategy is open to all of the other partners who play in the data center—and, hence, the need for a virtual data center operating system.

It’s that layer of software that allows our customers to start treating all of their internal resources as a giant pool that they can provision loads onto. It addresses both existing approaches to writing applications, like Windows and Linux, as well as future ways of writing applications. And it provides a way whereby specialized infrastructure vendors—whether they be storage or networking—can plug into that environment.