Over the past decade, one company's cloud computing solutions have saved its clients 603million megawatt-hours of power consumption. That's enough electricity to power Spain, Germany and Switzerland for a year. This was the startling claim made by Pat Gelsinger, CEO of cloud computing leader VMware, speaking of its vSphere products that create "virtual machines" for processing information technology workloads.It is even more astonishing, then, that the proportion of IT workloads being processed via the cloud has increased from 2% to only 27% over this period. Gelsinger said it would take another five years for it to pass the 50% mark."It's not just good business, it's an environmental imperative," said Gelsinger in his keynote address at the annual VMworld conference in Barcelona this week.story_article_left1He also unveiled a new product called Workspace ONE Essentials, which allows companies to standardise applications and files across all devices, from computers to tablets and smartphones. The significance of the product lies in its ability to allow company employees to use personal, "unmanaged" devices to access business applications through an "identity-defined workspace". This means that any cloud-based application can be used on any device via any cloud service. The need for such a product is obvious, yet it has only emerged now, six years into the bring-your-own-device workplace technology revolution."We've been saying it for years, but it took someone to pull it all together," said Sanjay Poonen, VMware general manager of end-user computing and head of global marketing and communications, in an interview with Business Times."When I joined in 2013, we were serving fewer than 15,000 enterprise customers. We now have 66,000 customers and tens of millions of devices that are managed and secured with our solutions."Poonen said he believed that this number had the potential to rise to hundreds of millions."At least a billion of the world's seven billion people are working for a company, and many have one or more devices."That device landscape needs to be managed and infrastructure deployed securely."story_article_right2And that is even before one includes the Internet of Things, the rapidly growing network of connected things like sensors and computing devices.It will add another few hundred million end points that need to be managed through the cloud.Ironically, said Poonen, businesses have still not caught up to the seamless lifestyle that many consumers already enjoy through the cloud."When you listen to music today or watch a movie, you're not lugging around CDs and DVDs. Your music is streamed to you or you download a bunch of songs and take them with you. Yet enterprise IT remains very cumbersome."It doesn't make sense. An app should come to you and not the other way round. If a file you need is sitting in the cloud in a secure folder, your applications must automatically become cloud- or mobile-centric. We think business users will transform a significant part of their day-to-day experience to leverage the cloud."This digital transformation is already happening in the most unexpected ways. For example, San Diego Zoo has been "digitalised", with implanted chips in every one of its animals.Said Poonen: "If you can create a digital zoo, you can do that in any industry."Goldstuck is the founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @art2gee..