Another VMworld came to an end earlier this week. Third year I was present and I can only say – this was another great edition. So let’s talk about my highlights…
My VMworld started on Monday when arriving in Barcelona. At this moment not the best city in the world to visit but I always love the atmosphere in the city and during the event. Once arrived I had two customer meetings in the meeting center. The meeting center is a place where you can have meetings with specific people in different BU’s about different topics that might be relevant for you and your business. They can go from just a friendly handshake to a proper deep dive in a product or function of a specific product.
TIP of the day – If you want to make more out of your VMworld ask your local VMware representative to setup a meeting for you. These are always great and will give you or your customer the insight you might need to move further in your journey to the cloud.
Monday ended in a very nice place with some of the vExperts in Belgium. When I attend VMworld I always organise a get together with the local vExperts. Everyone is free to join and have a couple of beers over a snack. This year Kim proposed the Garage. A microbrewery with some great beers. Job well done Kim Bottu. Shame you couldn’t attend VMworld this year!
At VMworld I start my week with the idea of a marathon: If you peak too early, you won’t get to the finish. I do believe in the saying “the early bird catches the worm”. So I get up every single day at 6am. Kick off the day by reading some e-mails and getting some work done. Getting myself ready – having breakfast and take a taxi to the Gran Fira. Arriving at the event at around 8am I always have a coffee in the vCommunity area so I can meet some of the people from the community and shake some hands. On Tuesday there was no difference to this morning routine. About 3 coffee later I was ready to go the first day keynote!
Over 14000 people were attending this years VMworld. The biggest one in EMEA so far! During the keynote we had a couple of reiterations from the US keynote. Project Tanzu, Project Pacific and Project Magna were topics that were part of the great story Pat Gelsinger presented. Year after year, keynote after keynote I see our story get stronger. The Any-strategy is working and is coming together nicely. VCF Everywhere was for me the take away. Bring everything together on 1 consistent platform that can be operated consistently and gives you the perfect platform to start adopting cloud for the workloads you think are suitable for cloud. Another takeaway was our Kubernetes story that is really getting stronger. Joe Beda described on stage what we are doing and what we are working on. I can only see this story benefiting all our customers in the long run! Adopting traditional and cloud native on the same landing platform. Should sound like really good music to all our customers!
My task this year was booth duty. A 10h standing job on the VMware booth. This year I was asked to represent AppDefense. This is a great story to tell about security and how VMware is changing the approach in this market. Although 10 hours is a long time to stand on your two feet I had some really good conversations during my time on the booth. I touched base with some of my colleagues who had booth duty too and talked to many customers about AppDefense. Expect a blog about AppDefense later this year.
In the evening I had a double booking. VMworld means busy times from the morning till the evening. Traditionally on Tuesdays at VMworld the VMware local country party and the vExpert party are planned on the same evening. This year the vExpert party was very special for a lot of vExperts. Pat Gelsinger the VMware CEO payed us a visit and really took the time to talk to every single one of us attending this party. He took the time to have some selfies and shake hands. For me this is the best CEO at the moment in the industry. Able to talk about VMware on stage. Having a strategy that is filled in more and more in every single release of a product or company acquisition. He is still a “human being” loving the interaction with the users and the experts in the community. That said I was really humbled and very happy to be on a picture with most of the Belgium vExperts.
Another day another morning routine later we had the second keynote. An hour long demo on how our solution fit the needs of our customers. From VCF to increase predictability and resilience of the platform to CloudHealth get insights in your cloud spent and best practices. During the second day keynote there is always an external speaker. This year it was Bear Grylls. He is the adventurer on Discovery Channel dropped into the wild and tries to survive his way to civilisation again. This was a very “deep” talk. Inspiring but also very recognisable as the subject was everyday life and how to overcome the difficulties.
Wednesday was also the HCI keynote with Cormac Hogan and John Gilmartin. They gave us a state of the business and the evolution of HCI into full stack HCI including VCF. Cormac gave some of demos about containers running on top of vSAN and full stack HCI. Really good to see this capability in the product.
I had the opportunity to see part of the Virtually Speaking Podcast with some of the big shots in the VMware community. As always Pete Flecha and John Nicholson were the hosts of the podcasts. Duncan Epping, William Lam, Ken Werneburg, Frank Denneman were part of the panel. The session was a highly interactive session about containers, the role of VMware any how it will influence today and tomorrow from a technological point of view but also from a human point of view. You fit in this new world was discussed during this conversation. This session was something I really enjoyed!
The last day for me was the “easy day”. 2 hour boothstaffing and 2 hour of meetings. After that my VMworld was over. See you later Fira Gran Via it has been a pleasure to be at VMworld once again! See you next year?
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