Today in his keynote speech Paul Maritz announced vCloud Express. vCloud Express is an Infrastructure as a Service offering which is delivered by the leading VMware service provider partners like Logica, BlueLock, MelbourneIT and Terremark. It provides reliable, on-demand, pay-as-you-go infrastructure that ensures compatibility with internal VMware environments and with VMware Virtualized services. It allows software developers and other users to easily access computing resources in a pay-as-you-go model. vCloud Express provides users compatibility with their own internal datacenters.

Customers can sign up easily with a credit card and immediately begin provisioning computing capacity at one of the VMware service providers like Terremark. Integrated firewalls, load balancing and network management features allow users to easily customize their cloud environment to their specific needs. Users will also be able to access their cloud computing environments via the VMware vCloud API.

vCloud Express delivers control directly to customers. They can setup new accounts, adjust virtual machine resources, turn additional machines on or off and deploy and execute virtual machine commands with no human interaction.

Terremark’s vCloud Express will be available in a limited beta program. The full launch is scheduled Q4 of 2009. You can find more information on Terremark’s vCloud Express implementation here.

Unfortunately Citrix is planning to disturb the party by announcing their effort to cripple VMware’s cloud designs by developing the open source Xen hypervisor into a full-blown, cheaper, non-proprietary Xen Cloud Platform (XCP). As usual Citrix has problems behaving itself at someone else s party and they announced this on Monday in VMware’s own house at the kickoff of the VMworld conference in San Francisco where VMware just announced its new vCloud Express.