In this talk we are going to talk about IBM strategy and technologies for private clouds.

First I shall discuss the evolution we see at our customers, from Hardware Virtualization, toward Image Virtualization and looking into the future how to move to Workload Virtualization.

I shall describe IBM's focus on integrated middleware in the cloud, and introduce the idea of Workload Pattern based deployment.

Following this I will demonstrate how these capabilities can cope with the new management nightmare i.e. the proliferation of virtual images.

Looking yet further out we see the evolution into what we call Workload Optimized Systems, I shall describe the concept and describe future research directions in support of this and in general of PaaS middleware for cloud, how to reach scale while maintaining consistency and simplicity of management.

In particular I shall talk about the notion / requirement for having a Stratified and Tiered Management system in order to fully utilize Cloud Computing.