In August, I attended VMware Explore Las Vegas. I always enjoy interacting with our customers and partners, and this year was no exception. The show was fantastic, energy was high, and excitement was rampant with a wide range of innovations that brought enhanced simplicity, security and agility for our customer IT environments.

Explore 2023 was a whirlwind of activity. I spoke to hundreds of attendees throughout my four days! Now that I’m back, I’ve had some time to reflect on all things Explore. Here are my top observations from the week:

1. VMware has simplified the adoption of the cloud, strengthening the private cloud stack and expanding our multi-cloud offering

It was gratifying to hear customer commentary on the richness of the VMware private cloud stack and the innovations we’ve brought about to create consistency across a multi-cloud deployment. The broad array of innovations across multiple business units reflected the deep customer focus we have coupled with reducing the friction for consumption.

This has made it simpler for customers to engage with VMware solutions than dealing with 4-5 other vendors to stitch together their stack for the cloud, which leads to complexity and cost escalations and prolongs proof of value.

Why is this important? As one analyst told me, customers are challenged when it comes to operating in a multi-cloud environment, or when their strategy with the public cloud does not work out. Whether it’s cost, operational complexity, or staffing, we see more customers opt for flexibility to place their workloads—making our solution more critical than ever.

2. Customers can easily consume a multi-cloud operating model for networking and security.

Last year, we introduced Project Northstar. This year, we delivered on that promise. I was thrilled to announce VMware NSX+: a cloud-managed, SaaS-delivered offering for multi-cloud. NSX+ is a game-changing solution designed to solve the difficult challenges of multi-cloud networking and security—all while being easy to operationalize via a single pane of glass. Networking and security are critical pieces to truly achieve scale with the cloud operating model.

As many of you know, VMware is the data center SDN leader in networking2. That means customers are deploying our entire IT stack on premises —including vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and Aria Operations. And, they’re reaping the benefits of lower costs, stronger security, and higher resiliency—achieving up to 171% 3-year ROI3 and 66% savings in day 0-2 network and security operations4. And with our new VMware Cloud editions, we can meet customers wherever they are on their multi-cloud journey. We’ve brought this goodness into the new SaaS and multi-cloud operating model with NSX+.

We also introduced NSX+ VPCs, the first-ever enterprise-grade VPC for private and multi-cloud. Gone are the days of drowning in tickets to get apps deployed. NSX+ VPC gives developers self- service and agility to spin up a full application stack anytime, anywhere without impacting the rest of the infrastructure.

And finally, with ransomware as ubiquitous as ever, we recognize that security teams need to have broader visibility and tools for multi-cloud. With NSX+ Network Detection and Response (NDR), customers can now correlate events from various threat sources such as IDS/IPS as well as Distributed Firewall and map them into threat campaigns aligned to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. This helps prevent alert overload and simplifies SOC monitoring processes across on-premises and cloud environments.

I summarized these in my keynote and encourage you to take a look:

We’ve already received positive feedback from our customers on NSX+ and NSX+ VPC, and we’re excited to see it continue to grow. If you’re interested in testing out NSX+, sign up for a free trial.

3. The NSX community is growing and is diversifying the VMware ecosystem

I was thrilled to see such great interest in the network and security sessions and the participation we had for our customer appreciation sessions. Security is top of mind, and our networking offering is very unique in the industry and it appears that our efforts to drive convergence across the network, security, load balancer product lines, and offering flexibility of deployment models is aligning very well with the buyer personas in these segments.

    • Breakout sessions were a hit, with packed rooms . The interest in NSX networking, security and load balancing was off the charts! In case you missed it, you can view most of these sessions on our Explore library.
    • After last year’s success, we hosted not one but two NSX Mindset events this year to kick off Explore. Nearly 500 of you joined us to learn practical approaches to security and network best practices with NSX.
    • We weren’t short on innovations, launching NSX+ Intelligent Assist at the Tech Innovation Showcase. While early days yet, this was demonstrated with a security use-case in the keynote sessions as well and generated a lot of buzz.
    • Hands-On Labls (HOLS) and demonstrations are always a big part of our show, and NSX was hugely popular in both. We featured 2 HOLs and 7 demos on the show floor. If you missed them, I highly recommend you check them out.
    • And, of course, VMware Explore is all about engaging with our customers in various activities, such as the Customer Technical Advisory Board, 1:1 meetings, and appreciation parties. I am humbled by the discussions with customers and partners that reaffirmed our partnership. My team and I strive to build upon the trust by continuing to deliver solutions that address the community’s needs.

It’s truly a privilege to see you all at VMware Explore Las Vegas and share everything we’re working on. I’m more excited than ever about what the future will bring. Now, time to take a breath and get ready to do it again in Singapore, Sao Paulo, and Barcelona. I can’t wait to see you there!

 

Sources

  1. VMware Analytics and Consumption Insights, Q2FY24
  2. IDC Worldwide Quarterly Network Infrastructure Tracker, 1Q23 Release
  3. Forrester, The Total Economic Impact™ Of VMware’s VMware Cloud Foundation, May 2022
  4. Estimates based on VMware’s DICE ROI and Value Modeling tool which contains detailed real-world data from more than 5,000 customers, June 2022