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Yesterday marked what can perhaps be seen as an end to an era with the departure of Diane Greene from VMware. The company's brilliant and meteoric growth, and its dominance in the "Server Virtualization" space cannot be denied. In some ways, we can all thank VMware for shining a brighter light on how customers can reap the benefits of virtualization in a broad sense. The awareness level for the word "virtualization" has never been higher or more meaningful. The next step is to expand what it means and what it will mean in the future. As we all know though, the landscape is shifting. Not just for VMware (Hyper-V on the horizon, Red Hat embedding Xen-based hypervisor into its next distribution release, etc.) - but for every company that plays here - from the data center to the desktop. I hear more and more customers asking, "what's next?" and "how can I extend the concepts of virtualization deeper into my organization?" For Egenera, we answer that question by taking customers to the next phase of virtualization - allowing them to extend virtualization to their physical servers, their business and mission critical applications, and their DR processes. I hate to speculate on "hype cycles" but perhaps as we look forward, we'll begin to hear a louder drum beat for "what's next?"