VMware vFORUM South Africa – Were you there?
If you joined us at vFORUM in Johannesburg this past month, you will know exactly how hungry the market seems to be for the multi-cloud message. Not only did we have record attendance, which admittedly almost gave our marketing team a heart attack, but we also hosted several partners and customers who really gave a keen insight into what it means to be part of the VMware journey.
To summarise, here are some high-level comments from our team, speakers, and customers!
Lorna Hardie, Regional Director Sub-Saharan Africa, VMware
This was our first vFORUM South Africa broad-spectrum event in nearly ten years, and our technology has since exploded. The event gave attendees a chance to mingle with the local VMware team and tap into their knowledge of what is now one of the most comprehensive suites of technologies to support a client’s data modernisation, modern application, and multicloud cloud journeys.
We recently concluded our flagship event VMware Explore in the US. On the back of this, we have seen many exciting announcements about how we continue to help our customers navigate through “Cloud Chaos” to becoming “Cloud Smart”. Positioning customers to take advantage of the right cloud for the right application based on the needs of that application. The way we see it, regardless of whether you’re a challenger born in the cloud or an established player, the desired destination for everyone is a multi-cloud environment that puts you firmly on the path to accelerated digital innovation.
Johan Marais, Senior Platform Services Manager, Discovery Holdings
The speed of innovation is not just driving change in the modern application landscape but is also creating complexity that IT teams need to continue to be one step ahead of. As an industry, we need our technology partners to continuously stay ahead of this curve. How? By delivering solutions that help us on our journey to embracing modern applications, securing them, and creating the infrastructure and cloud environments, we need to serve our businesses’ needs better.
VMware’s vFORUM provided an opportunity for like-minded technologists to get back in-person, to learn and share from one another around current tech trends and solutions in this multicloud world.
Ian Jansen van Rensburg, Solution Engineering Director, VMware Sub-Saharan Africa
vFORUM really brought our customers and partners together, providing them insights into how companies can drive their digital transformation strategies, optimise, innovate, and be more competitive. What our customers and partners experienced is how our platform teams focus on delivering a great developer experience while also providing a solution for deploying and running applications more securely, reliably, and at scale on any cloud.
Whether you are starting with transforming the data centre with existing or new applications built in the cloud, the event was the perfect guide to help develop a technology roadmap to help you run any application on any cloud.
Graham Vorster, founder of Black Swan Technology Consulting
South Africa has historically been positioned as one of the top three economies in Africa alongside Egypt and Nigeria. However, the South African economy outperformed these countries in previous years, with reference to it being a complex economy and the leading large economy when measured by IT indicators like network, datacentre, and digital readiness.
That said, more recently some of our underlying infrastructure and human resource indicators have started to deteriorate. Among these is the current loadshedding crisis and skills readiness, specifically education applicability to digital adoption. The opportunity for South Africa lies with technology drivers such as the Metaverse which can substantially increase the GDP of a territory. But to take advantage of this opportunity, we need underpinning technologies and resources to work in concert before we take the step towards an “Inventor Economy”.
To stay relevant on the global stage and to take advantage of emerging digital use cases, like the metaverse, we need to make sure we continue to improve the foundational platforms required to do so. VMware provides large parts of the digital foundation that a business requires to accelerate their evolution to being a player in the “inventor economy”.
Sumeeth Singh, Cloud Provider Business Head, VMware Sub-Saharan Africa
As customers levitate towards consuming “everything as a service”, cloud providers are aptly positioned to deliver VMware’s suite of products in an as-a-service or consumption model. Added to this is the fact that when a customer makes use of a managed service provider, they get access to a partner that helps to simplify SaaS and the subscription process for our customers.
While our technology will continue to deliver on our customers multi-cloud journeys, customers must now decide how they wish to consume the cloud. This is exactly why cloud and managed service provider partners provide flexible consumption plans and the support customers need to make the cloud journey a reality.
Lee Syse, Lead Cloud Solutions Architect Cloud Providers, VMware Sub-Saharan Africa
We are exceptionally proud of the strides we are making around growing our cloud partner base as well as the interest we are seeing from these partners in developing and growing their competencies to elevate their status to that of being a verified partner. The VMware Cloud Verified status, references a partner who has made the investment in the technology and business model to provide an enterprise grade local cloud.
As we see the local cloud market mature, our South African VMware Cloud Verified Partners are aptly positioned to deliver a rich set of cloud services, that are sovereign in nature. And, as a result, we are starting to see growing interest by local companies for local cloud partners that can support their local cloud initiatives. Businesses are no longer content with not knowing where their cloud resides or not having the peace of mind that when they pick up a phone there will always be an individual with a direct interest in their business on the other end of the line.
Missed out on this year’s event? You can still catch us at VMware Explore Europe in November. Or you can always give us a call and we would happily set up some time to chat.
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