NEWS ANALYSIS: Why the term "software defined" has found a home in front of just about every one of EMC's products and services.

VMware's revenue increased a healthy 13 percent to $1.19 billion, but profits dipped 9.3 percent from a year ago.

This virtualized storage fabric can include disk, tape, object and cloud storage -- it doesn't matter to the gateway.

Hypervisors are complex enterprise software packages. They are the orchestrators in virtualized systems of applications, services, storage, data flows and other functions. VMware, virtual machine software which runs in about 92 percent of all the world's enterprise systems, remains the hands-down pace-setter in this department. Its vCloud Suite, launched last fall, is a master control panel for what IT people—especially VMware marketers—are now calling the "software-defined data center" (SDDC). Software-defined everything is coming into play: servers, networking, storage and now data centers. The SDDC trend started out as merely a marketing term, but it is coming true. It also is indicative of the clear trend toward centralized control in new-generation data centers. Like other heavy-duty applications, vCloud Suite has features of which even sophisticated users may not be aware of. In this slide show, eWEEK talked with VMware to bring some of these heretofore "hidden treasures" to the fore.