VMworld 2010 could have some major consequences for Business Service Management, and with this in mind, maybe the most important announcement at the show was the unveiling of VMware’s strategy to drive IT as a Service - the transformation of IT to a more business-centric approach, focusing on outcomes such as operational efficiency, competitiveness and rapid response. According to VMware, this means shifting IT’s responsibility from simply delivering IT services to optimizing production and consumption of those services to support the organization’s business requirements. Ultimately, this changes the role of IT from a cost center to a center of strategic value.

VMware’s vision of a business-centric “IT as a Service” model is supported by the company’s efforts to improve approaches at the critical layers of what VMware defines as the modern IT architecture: infrastructure, applications and end-user access. Central to the VMware strategy is an infrastructure that will enable IT to redefine its relationship with the business, by producing services in a self-service model, with consistent policies and business contracts aligning resources to business needs.

“A shift to a services-based relationship and much faster response to demand are two reasons why virtualization fundamentally affects more than IT,” says Thomas Bittman from Gartner. “Cloud computing is more than an infrastructure change, it is a change in the relationship between IT and the business. The decoupling created by virtualization, combined with defined service offerings and automation, is a great enabler of cloud computing.”

Within the IT as a Service model, VMware predicts the physical boundaries that have governed enterprise IT will erode, and pools of resources will combine the enterprise datacenter with external or public cloud providers, without compromising security or quality of service. VMware sees the consumer of IT services gaining near infinite resources, accessible on demand, with performance levels matched to business priorities.

The company’s strategy seeks to free users and IT from complex, device-centric computing and deliver a more consumer-focused cloud experience for the enterprise. VMware backed up this strategy with major announcements at VMworld 2010, including the introduction of VMware vFabric, a cloud application platform that includes application performance management from VMware’s Hyperic monitoring tool. Together, these technologies are expected to change the way applications are delivered and managed, and drive IT as a Service.