The Virtual Computing Initiative (VCI) represents a community of educators, researchers and IT personnel from universities, community colleges and K-12 systems - together with partners from industry - working together to improve the quality and access of education through:

• the application of technology, system/process analyses and other advanced techniques;
• the development and distribution of advanced educational services (e.g., based upon openly shared content and software); and
• the application of recommended hardware, software, etc. to achieve these goals.

The VCI community will specifically focus on three important "components" that will support these activities:

• a library of pre-configured images (currently comprised of various OS', applications, middleware, etc.) - that will hopefully lead to a library of services (built upon these images, together with other software components, educational multimedia content and materials, etc.) - that will be available to all VCI members.
• the delivery platform required to use these images (and ultimately services). Currently, the recommended IT infrastructure model to use these services is the NC State Virtual Computing Lab  (VCL; see http://vcl.ncsu.edu. The expectation is that the VCL model will evolve and be augmented over time, and that many different compatible services delivery platforms may exist (provided by different vendors, developed by different educational institutions) to address different  needs and cost points. An initial goal of the VCI will be to replicate the VCL model at member institutions and to foster research projects into the improvement of this delivery services platform to address the needs of the community.
• a list of recommended (though not necessarily certified) service delivery platforms and components that the VCI community believes will support the above mentioned VCL images and educational services and complies with existing (relevant) open standards .