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Three weeks ago, VMware and Salesforce.com launched VMforce, a Salesforce-hosted platform as a service (PaaS) solution based on VMware runtime technology and force.com application services. In my analysis of the announcement, I wrote:

The VMforce announcement is a great step for SalesForce.com, in large part because it lets them address a recurring concern about the Force.com PaaS [platform as a service] offering: the lack of portability of Apex applications. Now they can be written using Java and Spring instead.

The battle of the cloud frameworks has started, and it will look a lot like the battle of the application servers which played out over the last decade and a half. Cloud frameworks (which manage IT automation and runtime outsourcing) are to the programmable datacenter what application servers are to the individual IT server. In the longer term, these battlefronts may merge, but for now we’ve been transported back in time, to the early days of Web programming. The underlying dynamic is the same.

There is the cloud that provides value by requiring as few changes as possible. And there is the cloud that provides value by raising the abstraction and operation level. The backward-compatible cloud versus the forward-compatible cloud.

The main selling point of the backward-compatible cloud is that you can take your existing applications, tools, configurations, customizations, processes etc and transition them more or less as they are. It’s what allowed hypervisors to spread so quickly in the enterprise.