The chief executives of virtualisation giants EMC and VMware kicked off EMC World 2009 with a keynote on the emergence of private cloud computing.

Taking place this week in Orlando, EMC World is an educational forum for attendees to learn about EMC’s technologies and strategies.

EMC chief executive Joe Tucci predicted that virtualisation will become the foundation for cloud computing: “Traditional datacentres are static – each application has its own infrastructure, no matter what its workload. In a virtual datacentre, resources are provisioned as needed. This is the type of environment to which customers are bridging today.

“The transformation to a private cloud – a dynamic, efficient, on-demand and flexible resource – is taking place now. There are very few, if any, applications that cannot work efficiently in a virtual or cloud environment and that is accelerating the move to virtualised datacentres.”

Over the past few weeks, both EMC and VMware have released new technologies for virtual datacentres and private cloud computing.

In April, EMC introduced the EMC Symmetrix V-Max storage system and this month VMware introduced the vSphere 4 operating system, for building the private cloud. Both are being showcased at the event.

VMware chief executive Paul Maritz said: “By and large, new applications are no longer being written to traditional operating systems. The new frameworks that people are programming allow us to find out in a much more natural way what the application is doing, and we can then use the information to make management better and use underlying resources – whether it is servers, networks or storage – more efficiently because we have deeper insight into the application.

“Whether you want to call it the software mainframe or the private cloud, the concept is the same. We have made significant investments to take those steps and are delivering that capability to customers today.”