The two greatest trends in enterprise computing at moment are virtualization and cloud computing, so it only makes sense that they would eventually come together.

CohesiveFT is a provider of an on-demand service for creating, launching and managing virtual machine servers. As part of an effort to extend the reach of this service, CohesiveFT has partnered with FlexiScale and Skytap, two providers of cloud computing services.

The CohesiveFT Elastic Server platform consists of different sets of application templates build on top of virtual machine software from either Citrix, VMware or Parallels, which basically means that IT managers no longer have to build each instance of a virtual machine deployment by hand. As part of the effort to make things simpler, CohesiveFT has also partnered with Oracle's BEA unit, SpringSource, Iona Technologies, MuleSource and WSO2 to create the application server templates that run on top of the virtual machines.

The advent of these types of services presents some compelling opportunities and challenges for IT managers. On the upside, it's becoming a whole lot easier to set up and deploy and application. That should mean that over time, the raw number of applications deployed for the enterprise should increase as the costs associated with purchasing hardware and paying people to configure and manage it drop.

The downside is that the number of applications deployed across the enterprise should increase. That means those applications will have to managed and integrated. In effect, the advent of cloud computing may simply shift the weight of management away from hardware and towards applications.

This could have significant implications for people that make their living by servicing hardware, but for the overall IT community the advent of cloud computing isn't likely to mean a net reduction of people in the workforce. It just means a shift in terms of the types of skills being sought and maybe even the type of company they ultimately wind up working for.

We all know change is coming in IT. The industry was built on it. So rather than resist that change maybe the time has come to be among the first to embrace it because the people at the front of line usually get the best seats in the house.