It’s one of the highlights of the year, and this year not only didn’t disappoint, it was the best one yet. While the conference is officially ending tomorrow, the majority of the action has taken place, and the closing party is tonight as well. Did I mention The Black Keys are playing (woohoo!), a great band I look forward to seeing live.
This year VMware set up a ‘pub crawl’ style reception for the vendor floor last night. I can say from experience (mostly good, but occasionally bad) that a conference host that looks for creative ways to continue to get the attendees in front of the sponsors is very much appreciated. Kudos to the entire VMWorld team for a great event! This week has continually, and at times overwhelmingly, had great booth traffic. I love the conversations and interaction with attendees that ask questions about how they can do more with virtual. We’ve solved problems together, built strategies together, and we’ll see success together from this.
Here are some closing thoughts on the week:
- Virtualization is still an opportunity – meaning that a lot of organizations are still looking for ways to virtualize more, virtualize more efficiently, and manage their environments more completely and simply. I would love to see the industry stats show more than just 52% of servers being virtualized next year –especially when anywhere from 70-80+% of organizations are running virtual today.
- Cloud is the answer and the future, but don’t go there without maintaining the same protocols for security, manageability, and control of your data. The same principles of keeping data secure, applications running, and information recoverable apply whether you’re housing it, or whether (perhaps even more so) you’ve outsourced part of it to a cloud provider.
- The Agile Data Center, the one that enables business instead of reacting in a legacy-hardware-procurement-centric mindset is the natural progression of the future of IT. It’s not about virtual, or cloud, or SDDC, or even deep reporting mechanisms – it’s all of these as pieces of the strategy that converge to transform IT into the Agile Data Center.
- Data is the lifeblood of technology, we create, share, and store more of it than ever before (and we’re not stopping anytime soon). With that premise in mind, it’s the people, the IT leaders and visionaries at all levels, that make the difference. The decisions they make, the teams they build, and the human interactions at the center of it are what make all of this work.
Thanks for reading my blog posts from this week, keep in touch on twitter!
- Michael (@Digital_Kru)
