VMworld 2017 Barcelona - Partner Exchange

VMworld 2017 in Barcelona kicked off with partner exchange, a day focused on sessions and activities exclusive to VMware partners. The theme of the day very much reflects the theme for the rest of the conference with the focus being on building for a secure mobile hybrid cloud future. VMware are loud and clear in their messaging that they are no longer just a virtualisation vendor. 

Our first session focused on VMware on AWS which has now been released for GA in the first AWS zone in the West of the US with a promise that the other areas will follow suit in due course. It was good to hear further information regarding to sizing including minimum purchase of 4 nodes with a spec of, 512GB of RAM and 32 cores per host. It was also good to review use case and how VMware intends to enable and support partners take this to market moving forward. 

Moving in my focused switched from the datacentre towards the user and workspace transformation. I atrended a number of sessions focusing on VMware's portfolio but also the user centric approach to building a workspace that will be suitable for your business but importantly your user moving forward. A particularly enjoyed the session presented by Greg Verdino focusing on digital transformation, I would highly recommend people watch the playback if you didn't make his session. He spoke about the human element to digital transformation and the fact that it's not technology itself that drives change but our adoption of technology amongst other subjects. 

The partner keynote was delivered by Pat Gelsinger VMware's CEO himself, he referred to vSphere as a single tool now in VMware's toolbox. Experessing to partners and customers that if you are just using / selling vSphere you are missing out! I was lucky enough to meet Pat in the NSX focus partner briefing, it was clear the NSX and Secuirty are a big focus for VMware's multi cloud plans and their future alongside mobility. It was a great honour to be part of the select group that had the opportunity to hear the strategy direct from the CEO but also ask any questions we had to ask.  

My final session focused on cyber security and the need for change, how the industry needs to unite to collectively solve the problem and hackers, well good hackers need to help create an immunisation to the problems. VMware discussed their new technology App Defense and how we need to protect the known good and not just the potential problems we may have which is the way security is often achieved today. 

In the evening we headed to the Dell party at the beautiful Miramar hotel on mountain Montjuic. 

We created a brief video with some of our thoughts whilst there