Videos

Announcer: The following is an ESG on-location video.

Mark P: Welcome to VMworld 2019. Twenty thousand people here, reputedly 250,000 watching online. A huge event because, of course, VMware is rather important to basically every site out there.

What fascinated me was that the first part of the presentations here focus so much on social conscience and it's interesting just as a general point to see how much many vendors are talking about that these days. Not just good technology, but technology for good. Of course, that doesn't detract from what the real message of this conference was which is about VM everywhere. Run, manage, orchestrate the multi-cloud.

There were key announcements of Tanzu and Pacific, which you'll hear about from my colleagues in just a second, reminders of the growing breadth of this organization with things like the intended acquisition of Pivotal and Carbon Black. And just again, a reminder that this remains not just a VMware conference, but an IT ecosystem conference.

Mark B: At VMworld 2019, it's really all about the power of the platform. I've watched VMware really transform from a virtualization company to a company that's really orchestrating workloads whether it be from an IT operations perspective or developer perspective across on-prem, across other public clouds, and really taking this hybrid approach where they can offer consistency of operations across an IT environment.

The other interesting thing from that platform approach is being able to bridge the IT operations team with the developers. And the developers really looking at easy access to platforms, new IT services, new ways to design and develop applications as well. So, really the power of the VMware platform really brings those two worlds together.

The other platform is really on the end-user computing side. So, here's an example where VMware is taking the ability to offer a choice of devices, choice of application, choice of data, and really be able to offer it to users to manage consistently across that as well.

Scott: VMware's any app, anywhere message communicates that it is the experience that matters.

And here at VMworld, VMware is expanding that cloud experience and simplifying it with work with containers, with new projects such as Tanzu and Project Pacific. They're embedding Kubernetes capabilities into what they're doing with vSphere and really expanding their support which is critical. What I heard from one customer this week is that all net new app development for them is going to be in containers.

So, this is incredibly important, not just for VMware, but for its customers as well. From a simplifying cloud standpoint, VMware and Dell technologies announced that VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is now shipping. So, this is essentially a one-click deployment for a software-defying data center anywhere in the U.S., automatically deployed. Really simplifying the delivery of the cloud experience to wherever you need it to be.

The customers of VMware need the cloud to be an experience and they need that experience to be powerful that solves their challenges, and simple that solves their needs. And from everything I'm seeing, it looks like VMware is delivering.

Mike: Well the big announcement was VMware Tanzu and its portfolio of products and services that will really transform how organizations build and manage applications with Kubernetes.

The announcement that caught my attention was Project Pacific. So, Project Pacific essentially takes vSphere and turns it into a native Kubernetes platform where Kubernetes becomes the control plan within vSphere. And what this means for both IT and developers alike, are they're going to more harmoniously be able to create environments and applications and distributed environments at a global scale. So Project Pacific is really the anchor to Tanzu and its arguably the greatest evolution that we've seen vSphere in years.

Bob: From a networking perspective, VMware cited their rapid growth and adoption of their networking technologies with over 13,000 deployments, including eight of the top ten telcos in 88 of the Fortune 100 companies. In addition, they had a new version on NSXT version 2.5. This brought some enhanced deployment options, especially when looking at the hybrid cloud.

It helped enforce policies across both environments and also streamlining the cloud deployments. They also talked about the NSX environment being a full networking software stack and that helped with the inclusion of AVI networks modern software load balancer. And the big news was probably around the NSX intelligence where they're having, basically, distributed intelligence throughout the NSX embedded into the product to be able to collect information, eliminate blind spots, and allow organizations to develop better policy enhancements.

Lastly, on a Telco front, they talked about UHANA. The ability to drive really that deep network intelligence, it's going to enable organizations to make the transition to 5G environments.

Kevin: This year's VMworld really amplified the impact of change on partners.

The early announcements about pending acquisitions of Pivotal, Carbon Black, and the partners that I talked to indicated they had a lot of questions about, "What is this going to mean for my business? How is this going to impact my relationship with VMware? How is this going to impact my relationship with different customers?" And it brought a degree of uncertainty. Change also can mitigate that kind of uncertainty and it came this year in the fact of the introduction of the new PartnerConnect program which has been designed to simplify the relationships but more importantly it has been designed to give the partners a roadmap and a course to guide their investment, allow them to be rewarded in terms of funding and guiding their progression moving forward.

I see this as a very important move. It's a modernization of a program that was, frankly, a little bit overdue and I think a really positive indication for the future of the partner relationship.

Mark P: VMWare is so central to so many people that when it sits at the center of an ecosystem, a solar system if you like, it's really easy to add rings and satellites as compared to if they were building a horizontal platform or a vertical stack.

You really can't think of them in that view. You have to think of them at the center of an ever-expanding universe and they just did more this week to firm that up.