I hate to say it, but the nail may have been hit so hard it was demolished.  Now, I'm not saying Citrix figured this out either, but for service providers or IT shops think that vBlock solves their user problems, they are wrong -- unless, of course, their user problems revolve around needing the top shelf architecture and API-driven provisioning engines for automation.

Who exactly is this [VBlock] system designed for? It surely isn’t the end user so it must be for the IT group. But if you believe what industry pundants are saying today, virtualization is all about the end user and client side of the equation. To paraphrase from Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, "IT is becoming irrelevant because it doesn’t meet the needs of the end user." So how is it that EMC, VMware and Cisco have missed the fact that IT is evolving into a Service where the end user defines the requirements and the system is built around user needs?

Link here.