OK, I may be mildly overstating the facts here, but I am excited about what I witnessed at the first ever VMware Partner Leadership Summit (PLS) that took place March 7 – 9 in Scottsdale, AZ. This invite-only event was an opportunity for C-level executives from our top partners to join our corporate leaders and dive deep on VMware strategy to understand how we will jointly win in 2016 and beyond.
On Monday as we all headed to the breakout sessions. Our team was a bit concerned about attendance at the VMware Hyper-Converged Software (HCS) session – led by Yanbing Li, SVP and GM for Storage and Availability and Parag Patel, VP of Worldwide Sales for Software-Defined Storage – which was slated at the same time as the CEO session featuring VMware rockstars Pat Gelsinger, Raghu Raghuram and Sanjay Poonen. Little did we know that we have our own rockstars, as Yanbing and Parag presented to a packed room with over 100 partners eager to learn more about VMware HCS and Virtual SAN.
We are lucky enough to have not only passionate customers, but also passionate partners. Three of these partners joined as guest speakers on stage in our breakout session. Uwe Neumeier, VP of Global Server Business for Fujitsu represented our technology partners and discussed the strengthening of the relationship with the latest announcements about extended VSAN Ready Nodes with pre-installed software.
Dan Serpico, CEO of FusionStorm and Perry Peterson, Director of Practice Management for MicroAge, shared the enormous success their customers are having with hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) deployments based on VMware HCS. Dan Serpico delivered a very powerful message to the audience about the direction in which the HCI market is going: “Business starts by listening to your customers […] If you are not changing with the business, you are going to be changed out of the business.”
Tuesday was even better for VMware HCS at PLS. First, Yanbing participated in the general session as part of a conversation about the strategic priorities for VMware in 2016, and got the partner community excited about the prospect of the HCI market and the direction of our technology. However, the most exciting part to me about the general session was that three of the four questions fielded by Pat Gelsinger and Michael Dell as part of the closing Q&A section were related to HCS and Virtual SAN.
We continue to deliver so much value to our partners and 3,000+ customers with VMware HCS. Everything I described in this article, combined with so many VSAN conversations we had at PLS exemplifies how excited our partners are about the opportunity that HCI represents to their customers. After attending PLS, it is crystal clear to me that 2016 is the year of VMware Hyper-Converged Software. And if you don’t believe me, you may believe our new head of marketing, Sanjay Poonen.
