VMworld 2016 General Session kicked off in Las Vegas on Monday morning with a sound of tribal drumbeats and a nice little poem loosely tied to the conference theme, be Tomorrow” The main presenter for the session was VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger – which was a change in style all previous events where former President and COO, Carl Eschenbach, has traditionally had hyper-energized approach to discussing VMware’s business and technology.

The General Sessions on Monday and Tuesday covered a lot of ground – below are the “Top 10 Takeaways from VMworld 2016”

10. Michael Dell’s Read My Lips moment: “No Changes to VMware Open Ecosystem”

One of the questions customers and VMware followers and partners have about the Dell acquisition of EMC is, “What will the effect be on VMware hardware neutrality?”  VMware typically supports; not just one server vendor, but all server vendors, not just EMC or Dell storage, but all storage, not just one networking vendor/Dell, but all networking vendors.

So what changes will Dell bring?

At the close of the Day 1 General Session Pat Gelsinger welcomed an unannounced visitor to the stage – Michael Dell. After a friendly chat, Dell answered (at least part of) the question people had been wondering.

Gelsinger: What impact will the Dell acquisition have on the VMware ecosystem?

Dell:  “The Open Ecosystem of VMware is critical to success and won’t change” Only an ecosystem of this size and power could really pull off this cross-cloud vision…”

Will this hold true in the face of quarterly sales pressure?  It is too early to tell….

9. The VMware Vision remains the same – (with tweaks to nomenclature, additional pieces defined and new products)

VMware has been talking about a similar vision for several years. The biggest change this year at VMworld is flushing out of products to support this vision and the new focus on being able to manage any cloud under the  “Cross-Cloud Architecture” (#1 on the list). Some of the products that support this vision are here today, and some are just taking shape. The End User Computing demo on day 2 gave a sense for the type of end user experience VMware is shooting for – but how close are customers to buying this (and how close is the complete solution?)

8. 50% of apps on “cloud” in 2021? Interesting Metrics on Cloud Adoption today – and predictions for the Future

In his opening Keynote, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger presented some interesting statistics compiled from analysts, public data and VMware data that provided a snapshot of where the “cloud” market has been – and what we may expect in the next 10+ years.

• 2006: 98% traditional IT, 2% Public Cloud (mostly salesforce.com)
• 2011: 87% traditional IT, 7% Public Cloud, 6% Private Cloud,
• 2016: 73% traditional IT, 15% Public Cloud 12% Private Cloud
• ** 2021: 50% traditional IT, 30% Public Cloud, 20% Private Cloud
• 2030: 19% traditional IT, 52% Public Cloud, 29% Private Cloud

What does all this mean and why did Gelsinger take such pains to share these numbers? In a market that big there will be “many clouds” – and VMware wants to be the one who extends their on-premise infrastructure to manage these clouds!

7. VMware increasing focus on $60B Opportunity with Service Providers

As customers move to cloud, service providers are buying more and more of the hardware and software required to run data centers. Gelsinger shared data that this 2016 is the year when the share of data center products purchased by service providers EQUALS the amount purchased by organizations for their IT.

VMware seems to be increasing focus on this opportunity. On the first day of the conference, VMware announced its partnership with IBM on Cross-Cloud Services, and the first opportunity he talked about in his session was what he called the the “Managed Cloud Services” (aka “Hosting”) Market. During the general session, he continually made reference to VMware’s large network of Service Provider partners, the vCloud Air Network.

6. “Hyper-converged Infrastructure, Powered by Virtual SAN”

In previous years, VMware has talked about converged and hyper-converged infrastructure in terms of EVO Rack and EVO Rail and their partnerships with hardware vendors, and talked about Virtual SAN as “storage product”. At VMworld 2016, the two messaging seemed to merge – Virtual SAN is both a storage product and a hyper-converged infrastructure product (Hey, it’s a desert topping AND a floor wax! – see the old SNL fake commercial).

Whatever you call it, VMware says Virtual SAN is “in the tornado” with 400% YtoY growth, 5,000 customers, and 100 new customers every week.

5. Bringing Containers into Virtual Infrastructure

vSphere Integrated Containers       Working with the VMware SDDC Stack

During the Day 2 General Session, Kit Colbert, CTO for Cloud Native Apps provided an update on VMware’s approach for supporting the development of cloud native apps, and leveraging containers.

The majority of the session focused on updates to vSphere Integrated Containers including the new “Container Registry” and the new “Container Management Portal” and how the container approach leverages skills, tools and the virtual infrastructure companies already have, to provide security, management and availability to containers.

Kit also highlighted solutions that leverage the Photon platform the solution with Pivotal Cloud Foundry that was announced earlier this year and an offering with kubernetes that is coming soon.

Both VMware container product offerings are published as open source on GitHub

4. SDDC Products as the Building Block of Cross-Cloud Offering

While the both the Monday and Tuesday General Sessions had titles that included “cloud”, the star of the show is still VMware’s suite of products to deliver a software-defined data center (SDDC). If you look carefully at the vision for Hybrid Cloud, you see it is enabled by SDDC. When you look at the layers of VMware’s Vision – Any Device, Any Application, Any Cloud, you see that the building block is the SDDC.

vSphere is the foundation of this approach, but the focus on virtualized networking and security (with NSX) and software-defined storage (with Virtual SAN) with management and automation provided by vRealize. Each of these elements continue separately, but Day 2 demo focused on how everything fits together to give businesses the agility they need, while making life easier for developers and simpler for end users.

VMware has often made a lot of product announcements at VMworld, but this year has been different. Announcements have focused on broad new product offerings and in the Day 2 General Session, VMware CTO Ray O’Farrell told the audience to expect product updates to vSphere (and we assume the rest of SDDC) at VMworld Europe in October.

3. Maybe the time for Virtual Desktops and End User Computing is Finally Here?

Sanjay Poonen, VMware EVP of End User Computing kicked off the Day 2 General Session by focusing on the top section of the VMware Vision –

“Any Device” with End User Computing Products that include

• Apps and Identify
• Work across desktop and mobile and have
• Simple management and security built in everywhere

As discussed in previous VMworld’s, analysts and customers have shifted over the past few years to the point where VMware vision and execution are rated tops in magic quadrant and customer market share has shifted. In recent reports, VMware has reported that the End User Computing business is now a $1.2Billion business. Part of that is driven by enabling 15-30% lower costs per user driven by improvements in the products and part is attributable to the increasingly robust solution – particularly the AirWatch platform for mobile management.

Most of the session was an impressive demo that showed the capabilities of the platform to provide a simple and powerful end user experience to deliver all of a users applications through Apple devices, Android devices and Windows 10 desktops and leverage the built in identify management, security and availability of the platform.

2. Security (and NSX) is everywhere – in every topic, in every demo and with every customer testimonial

Security was not a stand-alone topic in the General Session and perhaps this is a sign of its increasing importance and improvements in the VMware products? Instead, security and compliance were a part of the discussion during every topic of the general session.

and the #1 Takeway from VMworld is 

Cross-Cloud Architecture (including VMware Cloud Foundation and Cross-Cloud Services

All of the traditional hardware and software IT vendors have been struggling for a few years to determine what their role was in “cloud”. Some bought service providers, some built services, some tried to “SaaSify” their applications.

VMware has been on a dual approach of 1) building their own cloud service with vCloud Air and 2) selling their products as infrastructure components to Service Providers to build their own cloud offerings.

With vCloud Air receiving very little attention in general sessions and the focus on partnerships, it appears VMware seems to have pivoted on their “cloud” strategy to:

• Offer a compatibility layer between the megaclouds (AWS, Azure and IBM) that ties to their virtual infrastructure
• Continued/Increased focus on selling their technology stack into Service Providers.

They call this compatibility layer, “The VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture” and the 2 main components are a) new product called VMware Cloud Foundation which provides a unified SDDC platform for the Hybrid Cloud and 2) a set of Cross-Cloud Services that provide security, availability and agility – and tie to the core SDDC infrastructure. Is this really a new product or just a re-packaging of VMware’s cloud portfolio? You can decide for yourself by looking at the CTO blog (see link below) and visiting the tech previews at the VMworld hands-on-labs.

As part of this focus, VMware announced a partnership with IBM, and plans to partner broadly to this architecture as an abstraction layer across clouds.

Want more information? Follow the links below to articles, blog posts etc…

• Click here to see the recorded Monday General Session replay
  • “Competitive Advantage in the Multi-Cloud Era
    Connecting People, Apps & Data to Propel your Business Forward
• Click here for replay of Tuesday General session:
  • Competitive Advantage in the Multi-Cloud Era
    Connecting People, Apps & Data to Propel your Business Forward
• VMware CTO Blog post on VMware Cloud Foundation
  • “VMware Cloud Foundation, the Unified SDDC Platform for the Hybrid Cloud is Here!”
  • * Includes list of Hands On Labs
• Top “Cross-Cloud Management Sessions at VMworld 2016
• ZDnet article: VMware’s Next Play: Managing all clouds for enterprises
• VMworld “Highlights” website
• VMworld Social Media stream
• Product Announcements at a Glance
• Press Releases
  • VMware Unveils Cross Cloud Architecture VMware Cloud Foundation(TM) Makes It Easy to Manage and Run SDDC Clouds; New Cross-Cloud Services(TM) Will Enable Customers to Manage, Govern, and Secure Applications Running Across Public Clouds, Including AWS, Azure and IBM Cloud
  • VMware Delivers Innovations to the Digital Workspace With Unified Endpoint Management, Windows 10 Support and Enhanced Identity Management
  • VMware Extends Capabilities of vSphere Integrated Containers to Help Enterprises Embrace Digital Business
  • VMware Further Simplifies Production Deployment of OpenStack Clouds With VMware Integrated OpenStack 3

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