At VMworld Europe, we asked attendees to send in questions for Paul Maritz, the CEO of VMware, to answer. He has now published answers to these questions on our EMEA blog. He talks about mobile devices and the cloud, our new collaboration applications Sliderocket and Socialcast, cloud management, AppBlast, and makes some predictions for the year 2012. The Q&A is currently available in English and German. You can read it all on vmwareemeablog.com.

Speaking of VMworld, we have now made all the keynotes and general sessions from the conference available on YouTube. You can watch them on youtube.com/vmwaretv – they are all in the “VMworld 2011 sessions” playlist.

As the year is coming to a close, we all look forward to the new year, and some of us even make predictions. Our very own CTO Steve Herrod has published an article on vmblog.com about what’s next for virtualization in the year 2012. He covers his last year’s predictions and gives himself an A+ for predicting the advance of new devices into the enterprise, and the need for better managing the numerous smartphones, tablets, laptops, and the like.

He then moves on to talk about five new trends he predicts for the new year. One of the biggest developments he points out is the increase in heterogeneity in end-user computing. If you want to read them all head on over to vmblog.com

In time for the holiday season, our vCenter Orchestrator team has released four new plug-ins this week, which should help you achieve all of your 2012 cloud automation resolutions!

The first one is the VMware vCenter Orchestrator SQL Plug-In.  If you have a need to automate operations on database tables and records, you now can do so without actually having to write any SQL statements.

The second is the VMware vCenter Orchestrator Plug-In for vSphere Auto Deploy.  If you are considering a move to a stateless ESXi architecture, this plug-in is for you.

Third is the vCenter Orchestrator Multi-Node Plug-In. If you have a need to deploy several vCO server instances because of your scale or geographical reach, this new plug-in makes it easier to manage several vCO instances from a single point.

And last but not least… the vCenter Orchestrator Plug-In for Microsoft Windows PowerShell lets you leverage your existing PowerShell and PowerCLI scripts and opens up many new capabilities.

Curious? Head on over to blogs.vmware.com/orchestrator for all the juicy details.