The big dog in front of the pack is now VMware. The company has been making smart moves recently, and with its purchase of SpringSource, it's suddenly one of the three companies in the world that holds sway over enterprise Java. I've been impressed with their ability to comprehend the market and strategically position their products. Evidently, the rest of the enterprise software world is also admiring VMware. From across the battlefield.

Today, VMworld opened in San Francisco with a keynote on the company's vision for data center management and IT operations. But while this hopping conference was kicking off, just about every other enterprise software company in America was waving and shouting from the horizon, attempting to atract attention.

Microsoft and Intel held a joint press conference today, during the keynote. Red Hat's annual JBoss conference took place in Chicago, where the focus was middleware in the cloud. Citrix, VMware's biggest competitor, bought every bench sign, billboard, and kiosk ad in downtown San Francisco a few weeks back. That's like having Windows ads all over the city during MacWorld.

So while the big boys--Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, HP--are also at the VMworld conference to show how well they play with others, the vast majority of their strategic positioning seems to have emphasised the idea that VMware is the new kid on the block, and that the other kids need to gang up and beat the snot out of him.