VMworld 2012 Recap

It’s hard to believe VMworld was already two weeks ago. As always, the event was loaded with opportunities to meet new people, learn something, meet up with old acquaintances, and catch a little Bon Jovi. It was hard to escape the focus on cloud computing with all of the recent acquisitions and the release of the vCloud suites. VMware has again set the stage for another revolution in the data center. Oh, and in the midst of all the announcements, Maritz quietly stepped down – going to EMC to make way for Pat Gelsinger as the new CEO of VMware.

With the new CPU based licensing for vSphere 5.x and the introduction of the vCloud suite, come and eat all you want because you can pack in as much as you can fit. There has been a lot of chatter around the cost of cloud computing, and the difficulty for small and medium businesses to achieve the efficiencies of ITaaS with their limited budgets. The new suite and the addition of DynamicOps to the VMware product set means VMware is setup to help manage private and public cloud resources. While it remains to be seen where that product will fall in the new stack, it is a top notch product that should add a lot of value to the vCloud Suite story. Add to that the Nicira products and we definitely have a Software Defined Data Center.

While there was plenty of talk about the cloud, I would be remiss not to recall the Horizon Suite announcement which brings together the application so many have been waiting to see. End user computing certainly has a much clearer future and as seen in the Business Process Desktop and other solutions in that space, VMware has a focus on building solutions that really work for businesses in all industries.

Something that really caught my attention was the focus on business metrics. As a consultant, I have seen many customers really struggling to understand the economics of cloud computing. The IT Business Management products from VMware add some much needed insight to the overall costs and possible gains of transforming IT to a service provider.

As always, with so much going on it was hard to catch it all and I am sure I am leaving tons out of this post. It was great to see some familiar faces at the annual Arraya VMworld dinner. We are definitely looking forward to another exciting year working with VMware and all of you.