In September 2008 VMware announced the future release of a set of APIs to manipulate vSphere-based cloud computing infrastructures.
More than one year later the vCloud APIs still are at version 0.8 (Citrix is not doing much better with the Xen Cloud Platform) and only five hosting providers in the world are using them through a beta implementation of vCloud Express.
Nonetheless, VMware is working hard to be sure that its vision of idea of cloud computing it the one that the industry will embrace at large.
First of all the company submitted the APIs to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) in September 2009.
VMware has a very relevant position in this standard committee since June 2008, when it hired the DMTF President Winston Bumpus as Director of Standards Architecture.
On top of that, yesterday VMware released two open source SDKs for the vCloud APIs: one for Python and one for Java developers.
Two additional companies, Cloudera and WebAppVM, announced their (beta) implementation of vCloud Express using those SDKs.