At its VMworld event last month in San Francisco, VMware outlined its vision for the “software defined data centre” – an idea that takes the virtualization concepts of abstraction applied to servers and extends them to the complete server, storage and networking resources across the data centre.

It’s a major shift for the company, but one for which the foundational steps have long ago been taken. Still, it will mean new roles for the company’s solution providers, and new opportunities to pursue.

I caught up with Grant Aitken, area vice president for VMware Canada, at the company’s recent VMware Forum event in Toronto, to discuss the new approach and what the company’s partners can expect.