VMworld Europe 2015 Summary & Thoughts
/After a busy week, VMworld Europe has drawn to a close, the ComputerWorld team were busy in Barcelona, attending sessions, talking to partners, eating tapas and drinking too much sangria!
Dell / EMC Merger
This week has been interesting for many reasons, firstly the news breaking on Monday that Dell will be acquiring EMC and ultimately become the major share holder in VMware. VMware did a good job of managing this during the day one keynote to ensure it didn't overshadow the whole event too much. Michael Dell spoke to the VMworld audience via a pre-recorded video discussing the acquisition and how it would still mean business as usual for VMware as an important part of the group of companies.
The Dell, EMC acquisition is going to change the landscape of the IT infrastructure world forever, it will be interesting to see it play out over the next 12 months until completion. Check out our article here for more information >> http://www.definetomorrow.co.uk/blog/2015/10/12/dell-to-acquire-emc
One Cloud, Any App, Any Device
The leading message at VMworld this year was One Cloud, Any App, Any Device, bringing together the critical elements of VMware's stack from infrastructure through to end user computing often referred to as business mobility.
One Cloud
VMware were getting mocked on social media regarding this element after it was used as the tag line in VMworld US, some believed that VMware's policy of one cloud meant that their vision was only for their own cloud and not other public cloud providers. This wasn't my understanding and I believed VMware were talking about a vision of bringing together all forms of cloud into a integrated management and operation tools. At VMworld in Barcelona we have seen this start to come to fruition with vRealize Automation Center 7.0 being released with support for Amazon AWS, Openstack and many more as well as other updates, We also heard from the NSX team who discussed there plans to be able to offer NSX on Amazon AWS.
Any App
The way applications are being developed for the cloud native world is shifting to containers, we have seen container adoption serge with Microsoft planning support for Linux Containers and VMware demonstrating the same at VMworld in San Francisco earlier this year. VMware are developing two ways to be able to integrate containers, the first being vSphere Integrated Containers allowing you to be able to deploy and manage container applications from inside vSphere, the second being a dedicated platform for containers based upon core elements only from vSphere called the Photon Platform.
Kit Colbert, CTO, Cloud-Native Applications at VMware, describes the significance of the two announcements made at VMworld 2015: VMware vSphere Integrated Containers and VMware Photon Platform.
Any Device
This is the element as some of you know that I love, in the modern age users have high expectations for their ability to use IT with ease and simplicity. With most home users now turning to tablets and familiar with apps that are quick and easy to install from an app store it has left enterprise IT look archaic. It is quite often that your average IT users will be carrying one, two or more personal devices with them, but due to IT security restrictions are unable to use them and resulting in work still only being able to be done when back in the office in front of your PC.
To be able to address this and deliver business mobility we have two very differing sides that need to come together for this to work in the enterprise, we need simplicity for the users but security for the enterprise to ensure applications are protected.
VMware have been working on this vision for some time with a raft of acquisitions in the last year alone.
Due to this focus from VMware and some smart acquisitions VMware are now seen as the leaders for business mobility.
For me I was really pleased to start seeing AirWatch becoming a more strategic part of the workspace suite, as we move forward mobile devices and mobility will take a bigger focus within our businesses and having a way to secure, manage and deliver content and applications to devices. I spent a lot of my time understanding AirWatch to a better degree ecspecially the use cases for Secure Content locker which I look forward to examing further in the future.
Solutions Exchange
The solutions exchange is the show floor at VMworld with many tens of vendors there to present there wares, this year it was as packed as ever with the big names in IT being key sponsors for the event. As usual the mass of the larger vendors were made up with storage vendors such as EMC, NetApp Dell and more. There was an increased number of cloud management and automation vendors also in the hall as more of us consider a move to the cloud or a cloud centric model.
Catch up on our other VMworld Content
Whilst we were at VMworld we were live blogging, doodling and recording interviews with some of the vendors, all the information can be found on this blog or by view the VMworld 2015 tag.
Did you miss VMworld?
If you missed VMworld and are based in the UK why not join us for ComputerWorld's annual VMworld update event, taking place at At-Bristol on the 12th of November. For more information click here.
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