ESG On Location – VMware Explore 2022

Sporting a new name, the long anticipated in-person event, VMware Explore, was back this year with new innovation, new conversations, and a new theme, “Cloud Chaos.” The ESG analyst team was there, on location, and in this video, you will hear from me, as well as Mark Bowker, Bob Laliberte, Paul Nashawaty, and Kevin Rhone, on the most impressive announcements and insights from the event.

Check out the video and hope to see you in person at next year’s event.

SUSE's annual global conference, SUSECON, held virtually in June, was jam-packed with initiatives and information essential for the future of SUSE and for the open-source market.

A lot has occurred in the last year for SUSE. For one, SUSE is now listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and was the largest enterprise software IPO in Europe in 2021, according to the vendor. I find this interesting, considering how long SUSE has been in the market. Based on SUSECON, it's clear that the direction of the business is focused on maturity and growth.

The 2022 Red Hat Summit was held on May 10-11 and covered a number of customer, partner, and industry expert approaches in open source technology delivery.

Red Hat has seen a lot of growth and market share when it comes to enterprise Linux. The innovation demonstrated at Red Hat Summit 2022 shows continued growth, not just when it comes to the OS, but also in ways that address organizational challenges such as skills gaps, edge growth, and modernization across the ecosystem.

Cisco Live! returned to Las Vegas on June 12-16. Getting back to in-person events has been refreshing and seeing remote colleagues and friends for the first time in a long while at this event was invaluable.

On June 15-17, Lenovo’s Infrastructure Solutions Group held an analyst summit highlighting the state of the business as well as its future direction. Kirk Skaugen, Executive Vice President Lenovo, President Infrastructure Solutions Group, kicked off the event by discussing the company’s four decades of innovation as well as the current data economy.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 did not disappoint and has picked up from last year. This event was held both virtually and live in Valencia, Spain, May 16-20, and included over 26,000 registered attendees, from developers, product management, DevOps, IT ops, architects, and executives. There were over 9,000 companies in attendance across multiple industries.

My full coverage of this event can be found in my TechTarget article titled “Highlights from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022.”

When I think specifically about the developer viewpoint, VMware Tanzu comes to mind. In the throes of this merger between Broadcom and VMware, I find it a bit concerning that the financial momentum surrounding Tanzu has tapered off over the past year, given that it was once one of the highest-performing offerings in the VMware portfolio. According to the latest Enterprise Technology Research survey, Tanzu's share of VMware's business went from 49% in April 2021 to 32% in January 2022. By April 2022, that number fell to just 20%.

IT organizations are continuously looking for new ways to drive operational and cost efficiencies and the data center is no exception. Data center staff want to take advantage of the benefits of a subscription-based cloud consumption model, but often don’t have the ability or budget to move their data or compute resources to the cloud. As a result, IT leaders are looking for ways to leverage resource consumption in a pay-as-you-go cloud model but within an on-premises infrastructure.

June is proving to be a busy month in the tech world. Cisco is no exception and has announced a new launch within their portfolio. I had the opportunity to attend Cisco’s Future Cloud event, and I am providing my summary of Cisco's future direction. They focused on innovation in these main areas:

• Extending observability and automation
• Everything as-a-service
• Accelerating hybrid cloud operations

Recently, I had the pleasure of attending an analyst briefing with Ben Bolles, Vice President of Products; and Mike Koponen, Senior Director, Product Marketing and Strategic Alliances, at Pivot3 discussing their latest launch. It was interesting to see the advances in the hyperconverged infrastructure space and the differentiation Pivot3 is bringing to market.

When we look at Pivot3’s core areas, it is clear they are competing in a large market, but they keep the focus on video surveillance. This is a market segment that is clearly gaining adoption, not only at the data center core but also at the edge and in the cloud.