I returned from Las Vegas after attending VMWorld 2016. There were some important new announcements that came out of the event that I wanted to share with our readers.

Earlier in the week, I posted recap blogs from Monday and Tuesday’s general sessions at VMworld. Below is a summary of the major announcements from VMware that came out of the event (with my own minor tweaks).

In this post, I’ll recap Day 2 of VMworld 2015 (you can find a recap of day 1 here). Over the past several years, Tuesday’s general session has been focused on the End User Computing space, and this year was no exception. Sanjay Poonen, the head of VMware’s EUC business unit, kicked things off by talking about how the overall VMware SDDC strategy is making the desktop/application virtualization story stronger than ever. He highlighted tighter integration between AirWatch, Horizon, and NSX as being keys to the future success of the EUC business unit. There was a lot of focus on VMware’s recently released Identity Management solution.  This solution comes in two flavors, one being embedded in specific editions of the AirWatch mobile management platform and the second being a standalone product which does utilize some of the Airwatch back end functionality. Both are primarily SaaS base offerings. In my mind, this is a shot across the bow of Microsoft as more and more customers continue to migrate data into O365. VMware sees this as a huge threat, not because of the email migration, but because many customers are also deploying O365/Azure based Active Directory services and they see Microsoft "owning" or becoming the authoritative source for all authentication to all apps.  VMware wants to be in the game of being that hub at the center of the authentication chain. 

It was a long but good week out west for VMworld 2015. This year's event was kicked off by Carl Eschenbach (COO) who said there were roughly 23,000 attendees at the event this year, a new record. Carl highlighted that the core challenges seen today by VMware’s customers are speed, innovation, productivity, agility, security, and cost.  Not a huge surprise based on what I have seen with our customer base. Carl then went into how VMware could help customers overcome these challenges and broke the solutions up into categories of run, build, deliver, and secure. The overarching message here was that VMware is keenly focused on making the first three (run, build, and deliver) easier and focusing on security across all of the various product/solution sets in the portfolio.  Carl also hit on freedom, flexibility, and choice as being core to VMware, meaning that they are committed to working with any and all vendors/solutions/products, both upstream in the software world and downstream in the hardware world.  We’ve heard this message now for a couple of years and it’s obvious that VMware is making strides in that area (one example being more and more Openstack integration points).

I recently did a video to discuss the emerging technology landscape around three primary areas:

Very quick post here. In case you haven't heard, or to serve as a reminder, the International Earth Rotation & Reference Systems Service has called for an extra second to be added to Coordinated Universal Time on June 30th to ensure the correct alignment of astronomical and atomic time. It's the 26th leap second adjustment since 1972. This could affect your environment!

Well, there’s nothing like coming back to the beautiful 4 ft. of New England snow after having been in the temperate climate of the bay area for the past week.  Might be time to consider becoming a snow bird!  In any case, there was a lot of news coming out of the VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) event over the course of the past week.  The 3 major announcements were vSphere 6.0, vSAN 6.0, and the VMware/Google partnership.  There was also some interesting news from EMC in relation to their highly anticipated launch into the hyper-converged market and the announcement of VSPEX Blue.  Today, I’ll cover the highlights of these announcements starting with vSphere 6.0.

I just returned from the Gartner Data Center conference in Vegas and wanted to convey some of the highlights of the event.  This was my first time attending a Gartner conference, and I found it pretty refreshing as they do take an agnostic approach to all of their sessions unlike a typical vendor sponsored event like VMWorld, EMC World, Cisco Live, etc.  Most of the sessions I attended were around cloud and software defined technologies.  Below, I’ll bullet out what I consider to be highlights from a few of the sessions.

By Chris Ward, CTO   Another year, another VMworld in the books. It was a great event this year with some key announcements and updates. First, some interesting stats: The top 3 strategic priorities for VMware remain unchanged (Software Defined Datacenter/Enterprise, End User Computing, and Hybrid Cloud).  Some interesting numbers presented included on premise infrastructure is increasing at a rate of 4% year over year while off premise (primarily SaaS and IaaS) is growing at 25% year over year.  However, the overall market for on premise today is about $2 trillion while off premise (cloud) is about $45 billion, and most analysts are saying that even in the year 2020 that 75% of infrastructure will still exist on premise.  The key takeaway here is that Hybrid will be the ultimate winner with most customers ending up with a mix of both on and off prem, and the secret will be getting the integration right.