There was a clear buzz of excitement in the room as Jean-Pierre Brulard, Senior Vice President and General Manager of VMware EMEA, took to the stage to share an overview of what’s in store over the next few days. With this year’s theme of ‘Possible begins with you’, it was clear that big things were to follow.
Jean-Pierre reminded the audience that 2018 was VMworld’s 20th anniversary, and the 12,000 attendees in Barcelona made it another record-breaking year. He talked about how we are living on the cusp of a technological revolution, where the key to success would be having the belief in transformation and a commitment to the future.
He then handed over to Pat Gelsinger, VMware CEO, who spoke of VMware’s achievements in terms of three acts: modernising servers, devices and hardware networks. It was inspiring to hear how siloed ways of working had been eradicated thanks to taking a bridged view of processes through the likes of vSphere, Workspace ONE and VMware NSX.
Particularly powerful was the reinforcement off VMware’s commitment to be a force for good, that we all have a responsibility to create tech that benefits people as well as creating profit. Pat’s announcement that VMware is now a carbon neutral company was met with wide applause.
He went on proclaim: “Today, we’re in the era of the technology superpowers: cloud, mobile, AI/ML and Edge/IoT. Together they’re changing history like never before.” It was this bold statement that set the tone for the announcements that followed.
The new method: learn, lock and adapt
Vijay Ganti, Director of Product Management and ML/AI Research, and Ray O’Farrell, Executive Vice President and CTO at VMware, came on stage and gave us a demo of vSphere Platinum. They spoke about how it used machine learning to learn ‘good’ behaviours and showed us how it learnt to adopt and lock changes within the app. Now, with such a platform, it’ll possible for organisations to rethink their security strategy and significantly shrink their attack surface.
IBM partnership goes bigger and better
Pat then introduced Arvind Krishna, Senior Vice President of Hybrid Cloud and Director of Research at IBM, who spoke with passion about the achievements VMware and IBM have jointly made in accelerating the client journey towards the hybrid cloud. Arvind listed a number of exciting announcements, including the new mission critical cloud, greater integration between VMs and containers, and a new IBM Watson and VMware integration. It was clear that innovation was the key theme going forward for this relationship.
Project Dimension takes a step forward
Project Dimension was first announced at VMworld US 2018. Now, at VMworld Europe 2018, it was announced that Project Dimension was to go into beta. By taking the agility of cloud-managed infrastructure-as-a-service and physically bringing it to where ever infrastructure is needed, the project will be able to make the most of the private cloud, public cloud and edge computing.
VMware Blockchain goes into beta
Also announced was VMware Blockchain, which will be integrated into existing VMware tools to help protect networks and functions that are needed for an enterprise-level blockchain. Pat mentioned how VMware is partnering with Dell Technologies, Deloitte and WWT to develop and support this new venture.
Other news included the acquisition of Heptio, a leader in the open Kubernetes ecosystem, that VMware Cloud on AWS will be coming to more regions this quarter, and that there’s to be a development of a VMware PKS competency programme in Q1 2019.
Possible begins with… AI?
The morning was all about the General Session. However there was a truly out of this world session that blew our minds in the afternoon: AI – A New Era of Trust & Technology.
Featuring Professor Brian Cox; VMware EMEA CTO, Joe Baguley; founder of Decoded, Kathryn Parsons MBE; futurist, Sophie Hackford, and creative.ai founder Alex Champandard – the star-studded panel covered everything from why we haven’t been visited by aliens yet, to the possibility of autonomous AI-led companies ruling the future of business without the need for humans.
Alex Champandard put our whirring minds at ease slightly, claiming “AI will be similar to the industrial revolution and immensely disruptive. Companies who adopt AI the best, will be those who have the best people behind the AI.” The AI future really does begin with you: the technology professionals and people innovating our industry.
We’ll be updating you on all the highlights from tomorrow’s morning general session, so don’t miss out. In the meantime, catch up with all the action on our Twitter page here.
