VMworld 2019: Quick notes from Barcelona

As VMworld Europe is behind us, I’d like to share a few highlights for you. But before we dive in, I am happy to report that our VMware Cloud Management Business Unit had a very strong showing across the board, and the feedback we are getting is very good. More than 4,000 people attended cloud management-focused sessions, along with 18 customers from all over the world who testified to the value they’ve seen from our hybrid cloud management solutions, and shared some of their experiences and best practices. Much of this content you should be able to download and replay almost immediately, as soon as it publishes, and I will notify you of the most interesting events that you may have missed.

Front and Center in the Keynote

In the VMworld Europe General Session Keynote, Cloud Management was showcased as one of our hot technologies. In beta now, our SaaS vRealize Operations Cloud offers self-driving operations to automate and simplify operations management with AI/ML to move IT’s approach from reactive troubleshooting to predictive innovation. Learn more about this beta here. We also unveiled Project Magna, another SaaS technology which will help customers to achieve a true ‘Self-Driving Data Center,’ starting with VMware vSAN. This offering will use reinforcement learning – collecting data, learning from it, and making decisions that will automatically self-tune customers’ infrastructure to drive greater performance and efficiencies. You can access the Project Magna beta here.

Hear from vRealize Customers Firsthand

Our customers are our best advocates, and we love when they speak up! In addition to many customers co-presenting with us at VMworld, we have highlighted several more in this VMware press release published on the second day of VMworld Europe. Read about the value these customers saw when they deployed vRealize cloud management solutions.

You will also be able to hear or see many of the recordings of our customer sessions in the coming weeks, we will cover this in future blogs, or you can check back on each session for recordings on their respective pages in the content catalog-

Cloud Management Deep Dive session

This was our flagship session, presented by Ajay Singh, SVP and GM of Cloud Management BU, and Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Product Management, Cloud Management BU, and joined by a customer from Region of Uppsala where they deployed the full vRealize stack. In a room full of 300+ people, Ajay and Purnima shared a rare insight into where our products are today and where they’ll be tomorrow. With an end-to-end demo and a customer story, this 90-minute session covered the market-leading vRealize product line, on-prem and “aaS”, and also highlighted Wavefront, CloudHealth, Veriflow and other emerging products and technologies. A detailed 30-minute long demo showed how our tools work together to provide even more powerful capabilities in the areas of automation, capacity management, intelligent workload placement and cost optimization across multi-clouds.

You can already replay this session here.

Hands-on Labs on New Releases

Back at VMworld Americas in San Francisco we announced a series of major upgrades to our cloud management products: vRealize Automation 8.0, vRealize Operations 8.0, vRealize Network Insight 5.0, along with SaaS versions of these products. Since then these products have been released and are now available to all customers. In Barcelona, attendees had their first opportunity to familiarize themselves with the new products through brand-new Hands-on Labs (HOLs) that cover the new features of these products. These HOLs enjoyed a huge interest from attendees, and have scored high on the top 10 HOLs lists for each day of the conference, and overall: