So off he trundled to his software licence vendor – an increasingly specialised niche these days, often but not always found as a sub-group within a traditional hardware reselling operation. They nodded through his verbal request for a quote, and carefully sent him something that puts together an overall quote which starts from the “Essentials plus bundle for three hosts”, at £1,529.41, then adds on four copies of VMware Standard for one processor (that’s £699 each), VCenter Server 4 Foundation for up to three hosts (another £618), another four instances of the year-long basic support/subscription (cheaper at £212 but there’s four so let’s say £848), and the same year-long support for VCenter (£245). In total, the entire quote tots up to £10,823.

Now, there could be a simple explanations for this. One is that it’s not actually a quote (even though it says it is), and that the sales team just ran off a quote form to (a) boost their internal statistics, and (b) as a lazy way of listing the current prices for a grab-bag of products. A plausible scenario, but on the other hand why have they counted four of several of the products and only one of several of the others? It looks very much like a semi-informed stab at a system specification to me.

The next simple explanation is a misunderstanding of what the customer is after – VMware’s own schedule of products and options identifies a more expensive version of the SMB product, which includes the extra-heavyweight corporate enterprise options, most notably vMotion: the price difference in US dollars on the VMware site at least gets this quote within shooting distance of reality, so I guess I might allow that the licence specialists thought the client wanted the full-fat, sequin-covered, fur-lined, ocean-going version.

Except that vMotion is the much-touted technology that allows you to ship a virtual server around between virtual hosts – without shutting it down or disconnecting the users. This is an additional software feature, but it’s one that can only work in the presence of a massive pallet-load of very swanky and highfalutin enterprise grade network and server hardware, to manage the presto-change-o Virtual Machine move process.

There are even doubts that this particular party trick is advisable – some people say that it’s like one of those Star Trek transporter accidents where the guy in the red shirt arrives with his spleen on his forehead. Not all guest VMs are amenable to it: extended trials and models of background consequences follow from even thinking about using it: not the sort of thing a harassed, solitary IT guy in a typical SMB operation should be contemplating a few minutes after he’s slit open the DVD case and typed in the software key.

So I’m left with the uncharitable option, which is that the software sales people have looked at the charts of prices and features for VMware and zeroed in on the fact that this very expensive option can be sold, and then used without any of the very expensive parts intruding on daily operations at all: the pricey one works in basically the same way as the cheap one, and caveat emptor is as far as they go when it comes to thinking on behalf of the customer.

When I fret about the role of either a columnist or a consultant, it’s always nice to see this kind of rampant and inexcusably obvious greed, because it definitely needs to be pointed out.

Has VMWare turned the tables on the competitors? Has it pulled off the great magic trick of pulling the tablecloth off the table while leaving the champagne glasses not only upright but still full of bubbly?

 Yes, I think so. Tonight, Contributing Editor Cassidy and I are having dinner with the senior Microsoft virtualisation people. And we will be reporting back tomorrow on their response to today’s announcements.

 But the move of VMWare to let anyone set up a cloud-computing infrastructure, to allow for SLAs and metrics in the delivery process, to let a customer have an internal business cloud or use a range of external cloud vendors (and cheefully move loads between them at will) has driven a hatchet through the lock-in plans of the existing players: Microsoft, Amazon, Google.

 VMWare’s CEO, Paul Maritz, used the analogy of the famous song from The Eagles – Hotel California – with a slight misuse of the line: ”You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave”.

His point with regard to something such as Microsoft’s Azure, is that you need to change your app to run it on the cloud. And once you are in, will you ever be able to move to a different vendor?

 The enabling of an app-hosting virtualisation cloud ecosystem is a masterstroke, and immediately lifts the game to an entirely new level. 

Maritz knows all about software lock-in: he was senior vice president of Microsoft, running the entire Windows platform group, for most of the 1990s. Today he espouses an open interface, non-lock-in model using standards based interfaces.

 If VMWare can really deliver this during 2009, at least in first-release versions across the board, then there is no question that VMWare is changing the rules. Anyone, including myself, who thought that Microsoft had turned the tables on VMWare with its HyperV strategy, has been shown to be taking a short-term view. VMWare has laid out a long-term strategy which is extraordinarily enticing.

Read my latest missives from VMWorld in Cannes on my Twitter feed. 

I won’t do the CNN-style instant new shape of Western Civilisation thing, 10 minutes after walking out of the hall – but there are a few snippets that seem to me to put contexts down for future analysis.

One was that while we are all seeing end-users going nuts about netbooks, I could only see three or four netbook screens glowing away in the auditorium: the traditional laptop marketplace is alive and well in the hardcore techie sector, at least.

Two: the welcome slide featured more Eastern European languages than Western.

Three: there was more processing power in the audience’s smartphones than there was in the equipment visible on stage. This is a step change from the presentation given by Diane Greene in San Francisco 18 months ago, with a stack of servers behind her. A very long time ago, even before PCs appeared, I used to do presentations which depended on an 11-mile multiplexed modem link to go from the mainframe suite to the presentation projector, and people thought I was crazy: it’s taken until 2009 for a sizeable presentation to be done on a link being shared by all those Twittering laptops up in the gallery.

The question in my mind is; was VMWare surfing a wave during the pre-recession years, or actually driving it? Will the uber-boffins who delivered the goods, keep doing so without their Den Mother?