All in VMWare
To start with, VMware Explore was held in San Francisco at the Moscone center. Not sure this was a great decision. They may have felt if they stay local, more companies will be interested in sponsoring, and exhibiting. For everyone not from the bay area, it was very expensive. Hotels were at a premium for sure. San Francisco is also dealing with a bit of a crime crisis at the moment, which has been getting a lot of news coverage.
There are some people in IT who become quite notable for always being at the center of great things. They enable others with their knowledge, and by doing so, they rise to legendary status within the community. Today we have just such a person, Duncan Epping.
So I have talked in the past about the rise of disaggregation and compassable infrastructure, and a lot of that was on display at VMWorld. I first ran into Liqid at the Open Compute Platform summit a few years back. They drew a lot of attention for showing how you could provision hardware assets as easily as you could provision VMs. Because it is all REST based, you could add physical hardware provisioning into your DevOps process. Basically, all of the components are joined together over a PCIe fabric to allow the dynamic provisioning of components.
Confluera is a newly launched security company that provides real-time attack interception and defense to detect and stop attackers navigating your infrastructure. Confluera is headed by Abhijit Ghosh and is backed by VCs like Lightspeed Venture Partners. Recently Bipul Sinha who is a legendary investor, a founder of Nutanix, CEO of Rubrik among other things came on board to Confluera as co-CEO. This company has attracted investment from the likes of John Thompson, chairman of Microsoft’s board. I was able to catch up with CEO and founder Abhijit Ghosh at VMWorld, and here is that interview.
Cohesity had a great showing at VMWorld, they had a mini golf course activation at the show and they were there to raise money for Special Olympics. They had Football Hall of Fame receiver, Jerry Rice overseeing the event which featured a couple of Special Olympians going head to head in a game of miniature golf.
Special Olympics has been a long time passion for Cohesity’s President and COO, Rob Salmon and he and CEO Mohit Aron were there to present a large (in size and amount) check to Special Olympics.
There has been a lot of interest in Clumio for some time. When I posted my last video on our dinner with Poojan Kumar, CEO and founder of Clumio, I couldn’t say a whole lot because they were still in stealth.
As I mentioned before, there was a lot of interest because they are back by Sutter Hills Ventures and Mike Speiser who typically invests a lot of time and effort in nurturing young companies in his portfolio. Then there was a lot of buzz in the community because they began hiring some of the best in the field. They hired a lot of people with experience in early stage companies that have been hugely successful.
VMWare acquired Avi Networks this year. This is a quick video interview overview of what the company is about. This next generation load balancer is cloud native and can work with on-prem, hybrid cloud, cloud and intercloud workloads, so if any of those things are on your agenda, you might want to give them a look.
“With Project Pacific, we are brining the largest infrastructure community the largest set of operators, the largest set of customers directly to the Kubernetes. We will be the leading enabler of Kubernetes.” -Pat Gelsinger
The big announcement of the show was the acquisition of Pivotal Software and Carbon Black.
I mentioned in my previous video that I thought the show was well attended. Part of this could be because they moved the show to the Moscone Center in San Francisco, which isn’t as large and sprawling as their Vegas shows had been. I also heard comments that there were a lot of VMWare employees in attendance to help boost the numbers. While that may be true, the booths were all pretty packed and there was a lot of good conversations happening. I don’t think the vendors who had booths were disappointed.
My last stop in SanFrancisco was for VMWorld 2019, and let me tell you it was quite a show. Last year my perspective was that it was a show in decline, and that VMWare was trying to stay relevant in a world that is increasingly being dominated by Cloud.
Clearly VMWare’s CEO Pat Gelsinger was on top of it, because they made some impressive and bold moves over the last year or so.
