Portable Virtual Machines
Having recently moved all our servers to a Virtualized environment, I have started fleshing out the next steps in our drive towards a "true" Private Cloud environment. I am convinced that all our servers should be portable from one Virtual infrastructure to another running the same Hypervisor.

The idea is that moving an application from one provider to another should not be a major application re-configuration effort. All management and monitoring services should be external to the application servers. This will allow the app to migrate to a better cheaper environment much more easily than today and will significantly increase innovation and competition. Infrastructure below the application tier should be open and commodity with cost and services being where providers compete.