This week CA is having their User Conference, and on Sunday the company CEO John Swainson, an ex-IBMer, talked about virtualization and cloud computing as well.

Okay, here's the deal. When you observe the big software guys and see how quickly they adopt emerging technologies, which will change IT the way we know it today, here is what we see.

Larry Ellison invested millions in old SaaS / cloud companies, which gave him zippo in return, and he now, together with Richard Stallman and Raul Castro, is a cloud hater. Don’t expect Oracle to do anything meaningful in the cloud space.

IBM is making lots of noise, but IBM is known to make lots of noise, even surrounding social computing, Web 2.0, and other children’s toy stuff, which will not earn them a single penny by a single customer by a long shot. IBM, on the other hand, is one of the top big guys that does understand virtualization, especially cloud computing, right from the top, from Palmisano down.

Microsoft really gets cloud computing unlike Ellison. HP is ahead of the others, which may be surprising to you.

Germans have no clue what the heck is going on in the world anymore and SAP will be lucky if they survive the recession better than Detroit.

Swainson is somewhere between IBM and Ellison right now - he does not get it; if he got it, he would have been screaming Eureka in his opening keynote on Sunday.

Cloud Computing winners will come from startups and little unknowns and these companies will be acquired by the big guys who came to the show a little too late.

The following is the outtake from Swainson’s keynote press release:

“In his address, which included a “Virtual John” in a “Second Life” segment, Swainson pointed to the many IT advances that are providing significant customer benefits, but also adding complexity and cost to an already complicated IT environment. Such advances as virtualization, SaaS, SOA, cloud computing and faster and more ubiquitous networks, improve and enhance the IT environment, but also add layers that need to be governed, managed and secured.

In specifically talking about virtualization, Swainson said it “promises myriad benefits—from reduced costs, improved service quality and increased agility, to a smaller carbon footprint and reduced business risk—all acute concerns for business today. With a sound virtualization strategy and effective virtualization management, an organization should be able to transform IT management and provide dramatic business benefits—a compelling attraction in today’s challenging economic conditions.

“Management is the killer app for virtualization,” Swainson said. “Management is the technology that will allow virtualization to achieve its full potential—to deliver all the benefits being talked about.”

Swainson pointed to recent releases of two virtualization management solutions— CA Advanced Systems Management and CA Data Center Automation Manager—as evidence of CA’s strong support of virtualization technology. CA Advanced Systems Management enables the management of several different virtualization technologies from many different vendors, while CA Data Center Automation Manager is a breakthrough solution for comprehensively managing the provisioning of both physical and virtualized data center resources and systems.

“CA’s approach to virtualization is all about managing risk and ensuring service quality, so companies can drive real value from virtualization,” he said. “Our technology discovers application dependencies and relationships so IT professionals know which virtual and physical resources are supporting critical business processes and can manage them accordingly.”