haven't done so and that leads me to wonder about the strategy behind the acquisitions. Add to that the fact that the trend is very much towards building ecosystems with third party ISVs (witness salesforce's App Exchange, the Apple AppStore, the AWS Marketplace etc) and I'm not convinced about VMware's software intentions long term. Which leads us to CloudFoundry. I've spent a lot of time over the past few months talking to CloudFoundry partners -- some already launched and some in stealth mode. Many of these partners are building point solutions on top of CloudFoundry in the hope and expectation that CloudFoundry will create a significant market opportunity. Indeed the level of buy-in that CloudFoundry has achieved in its short life is exceptional -- vendors like AppFog, IronFoundry and many others hitching their wagons to CloudFoundry's horse. While it is true that a small company can potentially make massive inroads by partnering with a large vendor, there are also risks involved in this. Recently I was talking to a company that has plans to create a service that essentially offers plug and play components within CloudFoundry. I opined to them that while I loved the idea, it was one which was at pretty high risk of being consumed by functionality introduced by CloudFoundry themselves. The age old question of what is core functionality, and what should be provided by ISVs yet again raises its head. I reached out to a couple of CloudFoundry partners for their take on both the