In an era pushing for more GREEN cost cutting measures, VMware now dominates the virtualization market. The software is seen as the ideal solution to cut hardware costs and reduce electricity bills for I.T. data centers.

IPO-darling VMware handily beat analysts’ expectations in its first quarter as a public company, tripling profits. And though investors had already priced a powerful quarter into VMware’s lofty share price, which has more than tripled since the software company’s initial public offering in August, the stock surged 5% after the report.

VMware (VMW), which makes “virtualization” software that helps companies pile the work of multiple computer servers onto a single machine, nearly doubled its third-quarter revenue compared with a year ago, generating sales of $358 million. Orders for new software licenses, a key measure of future revenues, also nearly doubled, to $248 million.

Third-quarter net income totaled $64.7 million, or 18¢ per share. Wall Street’s consensus estimate was that VMware would earn 17¢ per share on $334 million in revenues, but the unofficial “whisper” estimate had investors looking for $355 million to $360 million in sales. As such, the results managed to vault the especially high hurdle analysts had set in advance of the Oct. 24 report. Investors bid up VMware shares in after-hours trading following the update, though some of that gain may have been driven by short-sellers forced to cover their positions after betting the company wouldn’t meet the market’s outsize expectations.

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Open-source database provider MySQL AB on Wednesday said it is injecting features into its paid subscription support service, which is aimed at simplifying management for large companies with tens or hundreds of servers running the database.

They include replication monitoring and advisory tools for database administrators that help them manage multi-server “scaled-out” architectures, where a database runs on multiple servers at a time. That is a popular architecture for Web 2.0 companies and other firms using MySQL and other open-source software in so-called LAMP stacks on generic PC servers, as it is considered cheaper than rolling out a few, expensive servers with many processorss in the same box.

One new tool, for instance, automatically detects a company’s replication architecture and advises clients of best practices, according to Zack Urlocker, vice-president of marketing for the Cupertino, Calif. firm.

The new tools build upon MySQL’s Network Monitoring and Advisory Service, which the company unveiled last fall.

MySQL is also offering 30-day free trial subscriptions to MySQL Enterprise, its paid commercial service.

MySQL has acknowledged it is actively seeking a public offering of its stock. Urlocker declined to comment on the timing of its IPO.

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Microsoft may be discounted in some circles as being behind, they continue to get oohs and aahs from some very sophisticated tech events. Think of what SeaDragon and Photosynth can do for us in the future.

When Steve Jobs takes the stage Monday at Apple’s programmers conference, he’s likely to give the world a glimpse of an upgraded Mac operating system that could herald the biggest changes to the machine’s interface in 30 years.

At the annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Jobs will probably show off Leopard, a Mac OS X update due in October that he has promised contains “top secret” features. But perhaps the most important feature is one that has been overlooked by many Apple fans: a new set of tools for building program interfaces called Core Animation.

Core Animation will allow programmers to give their applications flashy, animated interfaces. Some developers think Core Animation is so important, it will usher in the biggest changes to computer interfaces since the original Mac shipped three decades ago.

“The revolution coming with Core Animation is akin to the one that came from the original Mac in 1984,” says Wil Shipley, developer of the personal media-cataloging application Delicious Library. “We’re going to see a whole new world of user-interface metaphors with Core Animation.”

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Multi-touch technology is going mainstream. Researchers have been talking about the power of multi-touch technology for quite some time. It’s often referred to as “Minority Report” technology, as a multi-touch interface was used by characters in the movie, but it’s been around for much longer.

It got another burst of attention last year thanks to Jeff Han’s demo of a multi-touch screen at the TED conference. However, it’s always been in the realm of science fiction or research departments until recently. Apple famously is using a multi-touch interface on the iPhone, and tonight Microsoft announced a multi-touch interface for its new Microsoft Surface products — which are more along the lines of what Jeff Han demonstrated.

Basically, it’s large screen-focused systems for interacting with content using a multi-touch interface. It’s not quite down to the consumer level yet, as it appears Microsoft’s first customers are mainly for commercial kiosks. Actually, almost all of the original customers are casinos — with the one exception being T-Mobile, who will use it as a kiosk for providing info on mobile phones.

However, what’s pretty clear is that big tech companies are adopting the multi-touch interface in a big way — and that likely means that we’ll start seeing it in many more areas, especially within consumer devices. This doesn’t mean an end to the mouse and keyboard as core input devices — but multi-touch certainly opens up a whole new way of interacting with computing devices that can make them much more useful in ways that simply weren’t possible with just a mouse and keyboard.