When back in 2005 we asked our globe-girdling network of industry executives, enterprise architects, software engineers, technology evangelists, analysts, and VCs to pinpoint what they thought the Next Big Thing would be, only one respondent singled out Virtualization and that was software industry legend Mitchell Kertzman, of San Francisco-based VC firm Hummer Winblad.

Here is what Kertzman, now managing director Hummer Winblad Venture Partners but still famous for having been the founder and CEO of Powersoft (which merged with Sybase in February 1995), predicted: "There will be more and more software products built not on traditional hardware/software platforms, but on virtualized platforms."