Tag Archive for vmware

A Glimpse Of VMware’s Relaxed, Informal Corporate Culture

February 17, 2012 / Kevin McLaughlin / No comments

I’m wandering through the cavernous fifth floor hallway at the Venetian, trying to figure out where the VMware Partner Network Awards ceremony is taking place. There’s not a soul around, nor is there any tell-tale noise that might point me in the right direction.

It’s a bit creepy, and walking further down the hallway, it occurs to me that this looks like the set of ‘The Shining’, and I half-expect a kid in a Big Wheel to go zooming by, with creepy twins ready to confront me around the next corner.

Suddenly I sense someone walking behind me — it’s Paul Maritz, VMware’s CEO. He’s lost too, but then he sets off in the other direction, which turns out to be the right one, and I follow him into the ceremony room.

Seeing Maritz confused is an uncommon sight: He leads a company that continues to do a tap dance on the backs of virtualization rivals, and whose revenue grew 32 percent last year. Maritz runs an engineering driven company with an R&D team of 4,000 employees, and he often talks of the implications of the Post-PC era, and how companies will need to be nimble in order to continue attracting younger talent.

“I am a father to three millennials. They expect things to work in a certain way, and they want to receive information in context where they are and when they need it,” Paul Maritz said in his Partner Exchange keynote.

Maritz is easily the least pretentious CEO in the IT industry, and he’s not wearing a tie at the Partner Network Awards ceremony. Neither are the members of his executive team who join him onstage to present the awards to the winners and pose for photos. The way I see it, this is a sign of VMware’s relaxed and confident culture, and how a company that is still riding high on its first mover advantage in virtualization has managed to retain the feel of a startup.

And I think it all starts with Maritz, who’s like a cagy chess player who hasn’t even begun making his most strategic moves.

Category: Data Center / Tags: , ,

Clouds Galore At VMware Partner Exchange

February 16, 2012 / Kevin McLaughlin / No comments

It is 9 a.m. and the VMware Partner Exchange conference is about to kick off. There’s a palpable happiness in the air, and perhaps that’s not surprising considering that VMware is a company that’s hitting on all cylinders at the moment. Virtualization and cloud computing are hot right now and there’s no sign that this will change any time soon. As if to punctuate that thought, I hear one attendee sitting behind me call out to another attendee, “We just got funding — a million and a half!”

The lights go down, and a man with glasses walks up to a podium at the center of the stage. He begins sketching  on a tablet looking device, and his brushstrokes show up on the gigantic video screen that spans the length of the stage behind him. Just as it becomes apparent that he is drawing a cloud, a man in the audience stands up, and in a booming voice, begins reciting a spoken word poem that is also about the cloud.

As the man in the audience walks toward the stage, the man at the podium continues his sketching, and soon the screen is filled with clouds of various shapes and sizes. It’s all very unique and creative and artistic and enjoyable.

Yet after a while, the cloud messaging begins to thud in my head like a sledgehammer. A headache soon builds. I wonder to myself how far companies will take their cloud imagery at these types of events — could smoke machines eventually come into play, to create actual clouds onstage?

Cloud is crucial for VMware because the company is starting to see the limits of its addressable market in virtualization. Cloud is the future of its business, and if the company can establish a dominant position there, it’ll attain Google-like status. But with all due respect to VMware and the rest of the IT industry, I sure hope the cloud stuff stops soon. At which point, of course, it will be replaced by something else that’s even more annoying.

Category: Cloud, Data Center / Tags: , ,

HP’s Missed Opportunity

February 16, 2012 / Joe Kovar / No comments

I was unable to attend HP President and CEO Meg Whitman’s keynote presentation Wednesday at the HP Global Partner Conference, but I hear tell she did a great job of addressing her company’s channels.

However, I did attend Monday’s and Tuesday’s presentations, and they were yawners. Most of the sessions were quite bland. That was to be expected from ESSN Chief Dave Donatelli who is a very smart guy but not an animated speaker. However even getting beyond the bland presentations, what stood out was the lack of a real WOW, I GOTTA HEAR THIS moment.

There were a few interesting bits of news. The intro of the new Z1 all-in-one workstation got the press up front for photos and videos, but it’s not a product that reaches to the mainstream HP partner. HP’s new ProLiant Gen8 servers also received interest, as did the new intelligence built into the servers, but there wasn’t that strong ring-the-bell-we-re-gonna-kill-the-competition that I would have expected.

And the message to the VARs on the first two days of conference was … well … I’m still trying to find a nice one-liner. There were messages, but they got buried under a lot of talk.

I even felt sorry for the presenters during Tuesday’s Americas regional meeting. The poor Intel speaker looked as if she were reading her presentation word-for-word off the big-screen displays in front of the stage. There was a fairly interesting panel of HP execs who really didn’t offer any revelations. And to show how exciting the meeting was, not a single VAR took advantage of the multiple microphones scattered in the aisles to ask a question.

HP’s real highlight was Mark Jeffries, a consultant and author who opened and closed all the presentations and was a real gem of an emcee.

Contrast that to the second-day VMware presentations which I also attended on Wednesday. VMware was right on track, hitting the VARs with forceful messages about its strong push into the SMB market with new campaigns and programs and incentives.

It’s unfortunate for HP that it missed a chance to go big.

Category: Channel News, Data Center / Tags: , , , , , ,

Using VMware To Manage Physical Servers?!

February 13, 2012 / Joe Kovar / No comments

One of my VAR buddies told me that VMware mentioned the new HP ProLiant Gen8 servers druing a presentation this morning at the VMware Partner Exchange. He said that the new ProLiants now have embedded VMware technology that allows the servers to be provisioned via vCenter.

This is pretty significant. This means that customers and partners will be able to provision both virtual AND physical servers (at least the ProLiant Gen8 servers) through a single interface. With the huge impact VMware is having on the data center, and the huge number of virtualized servers being provisioned using VMware technology, the ability to use vCenter to also manage HP ProLiant servers gives a single console to handle both.

Hopefully we’ll hear more about this shortly.

Category: Channel News, Data Center / Tags: , , , ,

Getting ready for HP and VMware partner conferences!

February 10, 2012 / Joe Kovar / No comments

Oh boy, four days in Las Vegas next week for the VMware Partner Exchange and the HP Global Partner Conference.

I hate Las Vegas. But I love partner conferences. What could be better than one partner conference in Las Vegas? Well, one partner conference almost anywhere else. Or two partner conferences in Las Vegas.

My bosses have asked Kevin McLaughlin and yours truly to blog about the HP and VMware partner conferences. I’m jumping the gun with this blog just to be able to brag about blogging BEFORE Kevin does!

While I’m not looking forward to shuttling between two primary venues and a couple secondary ones and eating terrible food, I am looking forward to great technology and channel sessions and especially the chance to talk to a lot of my VAR buddies.

So keep tuned here for updates from the two conferences. And if you have a lot of extra time on your hands and nothing better to do, you can also read Kevin’s blog.

After you read mine, of course.

(Disclosure — Kevin M. is my manager extraordinaire, and if these blogs continue to be available after the VMware and HP partner conferences start, it means he does have a good sense of humor. Or that he is so busy he tolerates me.)

 

Category: Channel News, Data Center / Tags: , , ,