By some sick twist of fate, Interop and VMworld are happening at the same time this week. That creates a real problem for those of us in the space where the application meets the network. Do we go to New York for Interop, which is conveniently next to the Web2Expo, or do we go to VMworld? Many companies, including Zeus Technology, split their executive teams, sending some to New York for stupidly expensive hotels and great food, and others to Las Vegas for slightly less expensive hotels and slightly inferior food, but better gambling. I ran into some of 3Tera’s execs at Accel’s reception at the Tao Opium Room, and they had the same problem.

Alistair made the call to go to Interop. I made the call to go to VMworld on my own nickel, since I have lots of friends in the virtualization business due to my time at Citrix, where I did strategic planning for their virtualization business pre-XenSource. Special thanks to Fortisphere for covering my show pass! I miss expense reports, or at least getting them paid.

But the real reason VMworld seemed a good idea is that, in addition to consulting, I’m working on a stealth mode cloud computing idea, and I guessed that VMworld would be the place for clouds. It sort of is, but not compared to Alistair’s cloud program at Interop. Sure, there is VMware’s Vclould announcement, and there are quite a few companies with the world “cloud” on their booth, and some real cloud companies like RightScale and SkyTap, but on Wednesday, there are more than 80 VMworld breakout sessions, and exactly one of them is about clouds specifically.

Why is this happening? It’s because VMware is focusing on virtualization in all its flavors, but the cloud computing guys see virtualization as only one of the enabling technologies that can make clouds work. So I guess it’s natural for the clouds to be attracted to Interop and Web2Expo more than VMworld.