VMworld 2017 EU – Day 2 Recap + Interviews

It seemed like a whirlwind few days at VMworld but Day 2 was an eye opener for many reasons which I’ll go into here.

Keynote

The theme was kept similar to previous years and Day 2 enhanced the Day 1 keynote by delving deeper into the solutions and technologies unveiled the day before. This format provides the audience with the knowledge and know how of concepts they perhaps didn’t key understand on Day 1. In this case VMware showcased a fictitious company called ‘Elastic Sky Pizza’ and how they used Cross cloud, HCX, Network Log Insight and various other products on stage. It’s good to do this as it reinforces the key messages from Day 1 and shows real use cases to the wider public. Chris Wolf, VP & CTO, and Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products (Cloud Business Unit) both played a part in demonstrating the provisioning of workloads, portability, monitoring and the extensive use of the product sets. Personally, I felt there was a lot of content here and the audience did start to feel a bit lost towards the latter part of the presentation so keeping the content light and digestible is a key element here but difficult to achieve in practice.

Dell EMC Elect Podcast

I was asked to appear on the podcast as were a few members of the community and I didn’t hesitate to say Yes. It’s always great to catchup with Mark Browne who runs the programme and it was good to give my feedback and thoughts on the event. You can hear my interview below after the 9 min mark on iTunes or via the the player below.

Itunes

Interviewing the VMware execs

My highlight of this VMworld was being able to interview some special guests for the Opentechcast podcast that I co-host with my good friends (Alex Galbraith, Ather Beg, Kev Johnson & Gareth Edwards). Now I always like to try and do something different at each VMworld I attend and this one really knocked it out of the park. What was a simple idea and something that seemed unachievable was eventually planned and executed just the way I imagined. Arranging these interviews was difficult as I was also on holiday whilst the fine detail was being planned but I was happy that I got in touch with the right people at the right time and all the pieces finally fell in place.

First up was our interview with Pat Gelsinger, CEO VMware, which was a monumental episode and was every bit as exciting as it sounds. Here’s a link to listen to it via the OpenTechCast webpage or iTunes.

OpenTechCast Ep6

iTunes

Second up was Sanjay Poonen, COO VMware, who I’ve always admired from his stage presence and candid nature. I just don’t think I’ll ever play the piano as well. Links below.

OpenTechCast Ep7

iTunes

Thanks for reading my impressions of VMworld 2017.

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