With the VMworld 2012 conference behind us, it is always ideal to review all of the announcements and insights that came out of the conference.
Let’s start with the major, non-product-related news. While previously announced, Pat Gelsinger officially took over the reins of VMware CEO at the conference. As part of the VMware partner technical advisory board (PTAB), I am very fortunate to know Paul personally. He is a highly respected executive in the world of virtualization and can be credited with establishing VMware as a global leader in this space — growing sales from $1 billion to $4 billion under his leadership.
The core of his leadership style is his “higher octane” approach to running a company, where he brings a sense of urgency to new product development as well as aggressive sales strategy in the areas of non-hypervisor servers and end-user computing products.
VMware also announced that it is discontinuing its much-loathed new pricing scheme called vRAM pricing. While it took almost a year to make this change, the good news is that VMware responded to its users on this. We originally told them during a PTAB meeting that this was a bad idea, reinforcing the same feedback from its customers and vendors. Kudos to VMware for that actually listening to the people that matter most: its customers, partners and resellers.
VMware also showcased a number of new products announcements, including its vCloud suite 5.1 – the company’s first solution aimed at delivering what is now being called the software-defined data center. You can read more about this here.
The company also announced the launch of its data protection suite, which is built upon EMC’s Avamar deduplication backup software technology. Replacing vSphere data recovery, this offering provides a more cost-effective, reliable and easy-to-use solution for customers to protect their VMware environments.
In addition, HP announced that it will integrate VMware’s vCloud suite 5.1 with HP’s converged cloud services. Customers can now easily import VMs into an HP CloudSystem without downtime or reconfiguration, reducing network complexity and providing greater workload support.
Steven Herrod, CTO of VMware, also provided a highly compelling keynote address during the second day of the event, which highlighted a number of new announcements:
- VMware horizon suite: This product offers a flexible, integrated platform for mobile workers to connect to the corporate workspace in the cloud, wherever the user is located and on whatever device the user chooses. It essentially combines the Horizon, Octopus and AppBlast projects with several other products and technologies. This product is currently in alpha and is expected to enter the beta phase by the end of the year.
- Horizon mobile IOS devices: He also highlighted VMware’s dual personality function (personal and work) for end-user devices, which was formerly only available on Android.
Of course there were many other noteworthy announcements including the ability to perform storage vMotion and vMotion at the same time, as well as enhanced vSphere Web Client.
One announcement that also caught my attention was VMware applying to join the OpenStack Governance Foundation, which will give users greater inter-operability between the various cloud providers.
For those of us in the government arena, VMware is an ideal solution and its new product announcements are very exciting. Further reinforcing this excitement is its new leadership and new efforts to gain active feedback from users.