"Intelligent Workload Management is a new and more effective model of computing that enables IT organizations to manage and optimize computing resources in a policy-driven, secure and compliant manner across physical, virtual and cloud environments to deliver business services for end customers.  A workload is a portable, self-contained unit of work built through the integration of the operating system, middleware and application.  With Intelligent Workload Management, organizations can build, secure, manage and measure workloads.

"With existing workload management tools, customers can allocate workloads to machines in an ad hoc fashion, as workloads have no policy statement or compliance enforcement, and they are difficult to manage and secure.  With Intelligent Workload Management, customers run workloads based on policy, manage through dashboards, and get compliance reports that assure security and fidelity to policy."

As part of this announcement, Greg Cullen, Novell's Asia Pacific Director of Infrastructure as a Service Alliances (originally from the recently acquired PlateSpin organisation) noted that although only 8 or 9% of current Australian sites are running virtualisation in production, "we'll get to 50% by 2012."

This is a big reason to look at the interaction between the real, the virtual and the cloud environments – which where Intelligent Workload Management comes in.  Cullen observed that the modern environment might be composed of components hosted in some outsourced Co-location centre, on Cloud-based resources and on self-hosted servers.  Any or all of which might actually reside on virtualised servers.  Intelligent Workload Management is able to manage this entire complex environment.