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VMWorld 2014 - Day 2

Digital_Kru
Level 2
Employee Accredited

“And… here, we, go.” – (Heath Ledger’s immortal performance as Joker)

The opening reception was actually as expected, it was bigger than ever; at least it seemed that way, looking more like GITEX than ever before. With the announced attendance of 22,000 people it would have to be bigger. The floor was packed with the usual suspects, up and comers going for bigger booths than before, and the usual plethora of new entries to the field. Where 5 or 6 years ago, there were a hundred or so smaller startups, now it looks like a VC swap meet, with vendors touting their niche solution, with seemingly half of them looking to get bought up by one of the bigger fish.

Cloud.

That’s it. If you were missing the cloud shift, it’s been seismic (no pun intended with Sunday’s earthquake). The evolution of how data is managed has either come full circle (if you’ve been around for 15 or so years in this field) or bridged the gap to what is the consumerization of IT and acceptance of not holding your own data anymore. We can thank iCloud and other similar services as it’s made us ‘ok’ with the fact that we aren’t holding our info, but have immediate access to it. We used to be (I say we, as the collective paranoid IT folks) so afraid of not holding our data we would keep copies upon copies of it, most of us still do, and rightly so. The acceptance of trusting another organization to hold our data has tipped the scales to where cost, flexibility, and simplification have outweighed the fear of loss. One word of caution though – make sure whatever target you choose for your organization’s data for cloud has encryption, data loss prevention, and data recovery mechanisms in place.

VMUnderground was not some secret, rave-like event; it was a fun gathering of attendees, and was actually above ground on the terrace and 4th floor of the Metreon. Beautiful cityscape views and great conversations highlighted the night. I was neither disappointed, nor wildly impressed, but perhaps I’d built it up in my mind to be something bigger than it was.

See you at the Symantec booth if you’d like to pick up a wristband for vFlipCup:

  • vFlipCup, 7pm, Folsom Street Foundry; you can register here as well