As dawn (and the last of the night's facelift victims) shuffle slowly off past Monte Carlo they leave behind a grey and wet Cannes with 4,500 attendees anticipating the start of the first VMworld Europe virtualisation conference.

Most of us are shuffling towards a last minute croissant and café noir right now as we get ready for VMware CEO Diane Greene’s keynote. Pre-show rumours suggest that security issues will be especially high on the agenda in light of alerts highlighted yesterday (and reported on ZDNET.co.uk) by security vendor Core Security Technologies.

Let the show commence…

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What else would you expect from a keynote intro session? Smoke, lights, lasers, rock music, applause etc… and we’re off. With a carefully memorised “bienvenue” and a “merci beaucoup” from VMware CEO Diane Greene, the statistics and feel-good facts started to flow.

This is only VMware’s tenth year of business, a fact that’s hard to grasp if you look at the big name sponsors (such as BEA, EMC, IBM and Intel) dutifully lining up to stamp their name on the virtualisation scene.

That said, analyst predictions from Gartner/Forrester and the like state that the full impact of virtualisation (in terms of its growth peak and adoption) will not be seen for another half decade or so.

THE PROMISE OF VIRTUALISATION

Greene’s keynote detailed claims that virtualisation can push up server utilisation to the 80% mark – and that it can increase data centre capacity – and reduce the possibility of human error…

… and if you really trust the value of statistics, you may be interested to know that, for one Italian company, it increased the time to deploy applications by 2000% - presumably they had only just moved on from punch cards and valves.