Next week, I’ll be spending most of my time at the Moscone Center in San Francisco attending the VMworld conference. I’m excited VMworld has returned to my hometown. No more flight delays or long taxi lines for me this year.

This is one of the annual events I look forward to most because it gives me an opportunity to visit with and learn from a wide range of customers, partners and peers in the industry. For those who attended the conference last year, you know the topic of Cloud Computing was all the rage. At the time, it was still a fairly new concept, and no one quite knew how to define it or how to do it. Fast forward one year and the definition is still up for debate, but the reality of the cloud is not. We are seeing a very real IT evolution here.

BMC is already generating a good deal of buzz in advance of the event, and we plan to carry that momentum through the show with a series of announcements and presentations.

While much of the cloud computing conversation at the show is going to be about hype and the hardware and software you “need” in a cloud environment, BMC is focused on helping customers take low-risk, incremental steps to move from virtualized environments to the cloud. This is important because there is no organization out there that is ready to move completely to the cloud, nor should one plan to. Most organizations have a healthy mix of physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon. That’s what makes BMC’s unified Business Service Management platform so unique. We can manage your IT environment regardless of where it resides.

On Tuesday, September 1, at 11:00 a.m. PDT, I’ll be hosting a presentation on the practical ways customers can leverage virtualization to build the foundation for cloud computing. I hope to see many of you there. But even if you can’t attend in person, you can follow the presentation via Twitter. If you’re not already following @bmcsoftware, I would encourage you to check us out. At 1:00 p.m. PDT, shortly after my presentation wraps, I’ll be hosting a live Twitter chat from the conference to answer your specific cloud computing questions. Remember to tag your questions with #bmccloud.

I hope to have a chance to meet some of you at the conference. We are booth #1420 located two rows to the left of the Cloud Pavilion. Please stop by if you get a chance. And remember, if you have a question, send a tweet to @bmcsoftware.