At VMWorld today in Las Vegas, VMware announed their newest initiative, vCloud “to Federate Resources Between Internal IT and External Clouds and Enable Broad Application Compatibility for Cloud Computing.”

The vCloud will be one of the many enablers of the Federated Computing environment that people like Tim O’reilly have written about in the past. It’s really the only logical way forward for the general computing environment. As we enable people to run, manage and price these computing environments, we get closer and closer to a utility market that mirrors something like the electricity market. Different companies will be able to set prices based on how expensive or highly availble their operation / computing environment is to run, and it also gives vertical hosting companies the ability to align themselves with different tiers of hosting providers.

When this model becomes widely adopted we’ll see a parallel widespread adoption of technologies that make deploying and managing dense computing more cost effective. This means a lot more containers, and efficient data centers.

VMware is definitely on the right track, but there still needs to be an open source provider for these types of services and directories. At the end of the day the tradtional hosting providers, and even companies that claim to be “cloudy” will have to find a way to integrate into the new utility market.