VMworld Day 1 – TAM day and HOLs

What a great start today especially as it was a dry sunny day in Barcelona. After having an enjoyable evening at the vRockstar party last night and meeting some new faces, it was down to some serious business.

This year I was lucky enough to have a TAM pass from our account manager and it was well worth it. Small crowds were entranced with speeches from Carl Eschenbach (VMware president) and Joe Baguely (EMEA CTO) and as ever Joe was great at painting a picture of the future of I.T with the focus on doing away with infrastructure thoughts and moving to more app centric futures. Since I am under NDA I cannot say too much but everyone will be picking up a lot of it at the keynotes throughout the week.

I then attended a great presentation from Kit Colbert, who works out of the Office of the CTO for EUC, and he led us though the vision for device management and how recent acquisitions have helped the VMware portfolio. I also had the pleasure of conversing with Kit over lunch which was a nice touch to the TAM day experience.

Finally, I was very privileged to hear from Ben Fathi (CTO based in Palo Alto) who talked about the strategic direction for VMware. Another great presenter who is passionate about driving change for the end users and within the hallowed walls at VMware. We also saw an interesting slide of when GSX 2.0 was released and how the vision for that grew into the more mature product we see today in the SDDC.

The day was well worth it and even though Pat Gelsinger was delayed and could not present it was a good day and well worth hearing about the vision for this big software defined company. Watch this blog and feel free to share amongst your peers as there will be more to come over the next few days.