As asymmetrical marketing specialist Joe Bentzel notes on his new Cloudwagon blog, EMC has another “family of products” carrying the VMWare brand, that position it to be the “poster child” for the next generation of software superpowers. EMC well-knows that its success both in virtualized storage and application orchestration depends on how well it works with others, as well as the opportunities it creates for its partners whose main lines of business are application development and integration. Joe calls the new area of opportunity “Superpower 2.0″. As I’ll be pointing out in the coming months and years, it is also fertile ground for Recombinant Communications, mostly because a the approach taken by EMC, both through Atmos and VMWare provide the level of flexibility and agility required for successful RC implementations.

For over a year, Aspect’s Unified Communications initiatives have been tightly linked with Microsoft OCS to replace (or virtualize) PBXs, conference bridges and interactive voice response (IVR) platforms. When speech applications are involved, they are to run in the remote server farms operated by Microsoft’s Tellme business unit. This approach has apparently left a gap in the strategy for deploying Aspect’s portfolio of workforce management and other contact center applications “in the cloud.” For the time being, VMWare will fill the gap nicely. The existing base of enterprise customers already deploying VMWare-based solutions makes a very good prospect base for Aspect.

The fact that Aspect has decided to partner with VMWare demonstrates that Microsoft will have to work hard to gain share of cloud based spending. We’re already witnessing a tremendous amount of innovative mashing up of telco, voice and self-service apps in clouds operated by Amazon, Voxeo and Angel.com (still part of MicroStrategy). VMWare is a much different animal because contact centers and phone applications are not considered its forte. Still, all of these solution providers justify their sales on the reduction in capex, opex and space requirements that result from virtualization.