In a press conference for reporters, the three companies said that the coalition will bring private cloud computing and virtualisation to enterprises, while at the same time simplifying the procedure and saving money for client organisations.

The savings will accrue, the companies claim from lower IT costs, as as well reduced energy bills and real-estate savings, as data centres become virtualised and migrate to cloud computing environments.

The partnership is being created in two parts: one is a VCE coalition to develop the new products, whilst the other part is a joint venture - Acadia - which will train customers and partners on how to install and use the cloud and virtualisation products.

Cisco and EMC are lead investors in Acadia, while Intel and VMware are minority investors. Plans call for Acadia to have a staff of around 120, plus its own CEO, which the companies are now recruiting for.

Joe Tucci, EMC's chief executive officer, said that Acadia's main mission will be to accelerate cloud and virtualisation product sales and deployment, as well as get initial operations rolling, and then transfer operations to customers or partners.

"It will be a repository of knowledge transfer and best practices", he said, adding that most cloud computing services are viewed as weak in areas such as security and that the coalition seeks to assist organisations in this regard, by allowing them to transition their data centres into the virtual world.

The creation of the cloud computing oalition have been rumoured for several months, but the three companies said that VCE has been in gestation for almost a year now, and is being announced, now that all three firms are ready to offer their services to companies of all sizes.

The joint services are being offered is `Vblocks' that bundle VMware's software with Cisco's virtualised server hardware and EMC's data storage technology.

Initially, three Vblock packages are being offered: an entry-level Vblock 0 which supports from 300 to 800 virtual machines; Vblock 1 which supports between 800 to 3000 virtual machines; and Vblock 2 which supports from 3000 to 6000 virtual machines.

According to Cisco, early trials of Vblock have proven that client organisations can achieve as much as a 40% saving overall, once all the costs are taken into account.

Interestingly, the VCE coalition says that Vblocks can be scale up or down in capabilities as clients' needs change.