Today is the first day of VMworld Europe 2018! The day started of by visiting the large entrance hall inside the Fira in Barcelona. This hall was full of different areas regarding certifications, Hands-On-Labs (HOL’s), VMware’s Cloud City, Alumni lounge and many many more areas of interest. After we got to see the hall we went on to our first sessions.
The first day is primarily focussed on VMware partners and (Cloud) Service Providers. We filled our calenders with sessions regarding a couple of important matters for us such as vCloud Director, Workspace One and Hybrid Cloud strategies as we wanted to know if VMware’s vision has changed since VMworld 2017.
But as it turned out, instead of going to a lot of sesions we actually got to be a part of the VMware Cloud Provider Technical Advisory Board (TAB) today. The TAB is specifically for VMware Cloud Providers and is meant to give us (the Cloud Providers) the opportunity to present feedback to VMware on how they can improve their products so that we can deliver VMware services more efficiently.
Unfortunately we cannot really elaborate on what was discussed due to that the session was under NDA. But we can say that a lot of feedback has been given to VMware regarding vCloud Director, vCloud Director Availability DR and C2C and VMware PKS.
The last session of the day was the Partner General Session in which Pat Gelsinger reminded us what VMware’s Vision was and still is for the coming years to come. Which basically comes down to “Any application, any device, any cloud”. As can be seen in the below screenshot. Somewhat new to us however was the “Telco” business. VMware stated that almost nothing has revolutionized in the Telco market in the form of what virtualization has done to the server industry more than a decade ago.
For those that don’t know or remember; back in the days VMware attemped to be a hyper-scale cloud at their own with VMware vCloud Air, but in the end they recognized that they simply coulnd’t catch up with Azure and AWS and started adopting and connecting the hyper-scale clouds into their own products such as vRealize Automation. The last couple of years this started growing into the vision that can be seen above.
They also briefly talked talked about VMware PKS which in its most basic form enables organizations to deploy and operate Kubernetes based containerized workloads in multi-cloud setups.
The last 40 minutes were mainly about changes VMware is making to it’s partner programs and channels, in which the so called VMware Competencies program is beeing revamped to be more streamlined to the four biggest industry pillars servers, workspaces, networking and cloud instead of beeing a mountain of competencies across different technologies which really didn’t quite show the partners expertise on certain subjects.
They also announced that the VMware EMPOWER Partner event is going global after beeing tested in the US and Vienna last year.
The evening ended with the VMware Cloud Provider Partner reception with some food and drinks! We ended up talking with a couple of great VMware people which gave us valuable insights on how to for example launch vCloud Director in our environments so that we can add even more services to our customers.
Stay tuned for more to come!
0 Comments