VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger used his opening keynote speech at the company's annual VMworld conference to emphasize plans to virtualize networks with the aim of achieving the success in virtualizing servers. Networking "is the most important topic we will discuss today," Gelsinger said to the audience of VMware administrators at the Moscone Center in San Francisco in a speech that was webcast. "We're moving to a world where the network is just like the compute, where we will be able to spin up network services just like we can spin up [virtual machine] services."