VMware will spend this week seeking to convince us that it will take the mantle as the cloud leader. But the reality is something far different as we head into VMworld, the company’s annual event. This is a space seeing deep disruption as new categories emerge in the change to more easy to use, commodity type services.

The lack of leadership is apparent when you spend some time talking with the team from ManageIQ,which is clearly articulating the unique requirements companies need to consider when integrating their data centers to any number of service providers. Their story is about how they abstract the complex management issues that come with orchestrating cloud infrastructures.

That’s the takeaway to consider if you are considering how to actually use the cloud. Provisioning your extended infrastructure is the easy part. The difficulty is in managing all the issues that come with it. VMware has pieces of this story and sees its DynamicOps acquisition as helping customers manage multiple cloud environments with an IT focus. DynamicOps supports multiple hypervisors. It can manage apps no matter if they run on VMware, Xen or a KVM virtualized infrastructure. But still, a complete, technologically sophisticated hybrid cloud environment is not available from VMware. And young companies are starting to fill the gaps.