Next week (July 8 — 12) should be excit­ing (hardly the sum­mer dol­drums). I’ll be at Cisco Live in the fast part for their annual ana­lyst event. It’s going to be illu­mi­nat­ing to hear what the story is now and how it’s changed since they hit rough waters. In addi­tion to prob­lems in the core switch­ing busi­ness, a lot of the orga­ni­za­tional changes recently were moti­vated to fix the prob­lems done with the goal of opti­miz­ing  inno­va­tion. So there is no easy answer: the core busi­ness has issues, and inno­va­tion is more impor­tant than ever.

Then, on Tues­day, VMware is mak­ing a major announce­ment about the next release of VCloud. Last time, the new addi­tions in secu­rity came at some cost to their ersatz secu­rity part­ners. Pre­sum­ing that this release incor­po­rates addi­tional “adja­cent” func­tion­al­ity, it will be fas­ci­nat­ing to see the new impli­ca­tions for the part­ner ecol­ogy. And you have to be curi­ous about why the announce­ment is now rather than cap­ping the upcom­ing VMworld meeting.

And on Mon­day Cit­rix is going to be talk­ing (at least to the ana­lyst com­mu­nity) about the Cloud. You have to won­der whether this is to keep from appear­ing reac­tive to what­ever VMware is going to say.

Any­way, it should be an inter­est­ing week!