It’s a wrap – VMworld 2018

The last 4 days were crazy. We had our yearly VMworld in Barcelona! I had a jam packed agenda starting monday morning at 10 am till today. We could summarize it to long days and short nights!

This was my second VMworld since I started working at VMware and it was great! I would even say “the best VMworld I ever attended”.

On Monday I got to Barcelona around 9am in the morning. Leaving Brussels Airport early for my first meeting at 10 am in beautiful Barcelona. I planned around 15 meetings in these 4 days and we talked about divers subjects. In my current role it was most of the time storage centric. However a lot of our conversations were about how we could help our customers to be more agile, have faster time to market and optimize the usage of both private and public cloud. With a broad spectrum of tools in our toolbox to support his message we tried to give all our partners and customers the best information possible fitted for their needs!

With an agenda that is completely packed I always try to attend the keynotes and get a feeling about the general messaging and how VMware is shaping the future. On Monday Pat Gelsinger was presenting with a coolness and an energy that I really liked. Being funny and being to the point in the same presentation telling the story about VMware and its customers.

While datacenters are more and more becoming centers of data he presented a great slide where VSAN at this moment has +15000 customers and helps to reduce both CAPEX en OPEX costs at our customers. These centers of data are now spread from the edge to the cloud creating a consistent infrastructure layer and operational model.

During his presentation he talked about security as one of the fundamental pieces in the IT strategy. He opened this topic with a blunt statement. Every year we are spending more money on security and we are not becoming more secure. We need to change the model of security to a model that can adapt itself and can adjust to current trends and threats. A great statement that I can only support! Another great part of his presentation was about new applications that need to run on the same platform than the platform that is used today. Introducing new and complex architectures is not what we want to do. We are giving our customers a choice. If you want to develop in your own on-site datacenter you can do that. We have the tools in place to support this strategy but customer might also look at cloud in various flavors. One of the flavors to develop new cloud native apps is in the cloud itself. IT controlled and secured environments used to give developers a consistent develop experience across clouds. Pat introduced PKS on VMC on AWS. What better place to run and create cloud born application than in the cloud itself?

At VMware we believe that technology can make our blue planet a better place. Tech As A Force For Good is the term we use to support this statement. As a VMware employee I’m extremly proud to work for a company that has this key believe that we can make our world a better place for all of us and for our future generations. 2 initiatives were highlighted during the keynote.

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This was for me one of the highlights at VMworld. We had over 700 people joining us for the HCI keynote. We discussed the current state of the HCI market and some predictions on the mid and the long term. This was also the theme for the rest of the presentation. We discussed current release of VSAN and its operational models. At VMworld in the US we announced a private beta for VSAN Data Protection and Native File Services. This BETA was made visual by demos presented by Duncan Epping. It was a great way to show our customers what we are doing and how we are evolving the product to support all different workload and storage needs.

A great demonstration about VMC on AWS and how resiliency is handled on that level. This was an extremely successful demonstration as it showed the power of VMware today and how it can work for you! In a nutshell, our vision manifests itself more and more as an integrated vision.

For some time I have been part of the vCommunity. Being a vExpert and organizing vBeers together with a couple of partners in crime (Tom and Kim) I started to understand the power of this community. This week this community opened up for me beyond Belgium and Luxembourg. So many great people are sharing their knowledge and enthusiasm with the rest of their peers. This is what a good community needs to look like. At the blogger tables you can just sit and meet new people all the time. Throw some stickers on the table and let people add them to their sticker collection on their computer. At the vExpert party, Kim introduced me to a couple of new people. People just start talking about their interests and how VMware shapes it to workable solutions at their customers.

Another part of the community is the county community of partners and customers that are attending VMworld. In the Benelux region we have yearly habit of having a party to celebrate our long term relationship. These are the best local networking events you can ever imagine. You just walk around and start talking to people you might know or just meet new people and extend your network while enjoying some drinks and a good atmosphere!

There is something about men and beards. We have an immediate connection and this is not different at VMworld. Let’s say it is even a cult of people sharing cool bearded stickers with the fellow beard brothers. One moment at VMworld we even took a photo with a large percentage of the bearded men at VMworld an amazing way to connect with new people.

This week was one of the best large conferences that I’ve ever attended. The vibe during the conference was just amazing! My schedule was jam packed and this made me an immediate part of a general positive flow. I truly believe that VMware can shape the future further with a great vision that supports our customers in building their business further and support our blue planet with Tech As A Force For Good!