Every era in IT has the big players that drive the market – from IBM in the mainframe, to Windows and Intel in the PC era.  VMware is led by Paul Maritz who knows all about dominating the marketplace from his days at Microsoft.  With Maritz at the helm, VMware looks to take its market lead in the server virtualization space to be one of the key players in the cloud computing market.  Today at VMworld, VMware made a number of announcements that strike at some of the hurdles for cloud computing to becoming a mainstream solution.  I heard from VMware staff that Maritz personally tasked the company to address security issues, which along with management, are the biggest concerns of practitioners looking at cloud deployments.  The solution that was announced today is the vShield family of products.  The vShield products build on VMware’s existing VMsafe security APIs – providing three new products – vShield Edge, vShield App & Zones and vShield Endpoint.