Special Report on VMworld 2019

VMworld is back in San Francisco, CA at the Moscone Center after a few editions in Las Vegas, NE during the remodeling of the congress center.

At the same time Oracle and Salesforce kept their user conference at the Moscone even during that working period.

The event was impressive like every year with approximately 200 exhibitors and sponsors and more than 20,000 attendees.

VMware’s ambition was clear wishing to be considered as a consistent hybrid cloud platform spanning all major public clouds as said in one of their press release. 70 million workloads run on VMware with 10 million in the cloud so approximately 15%. These workloads are running in 10,000 data centers.

The show started with a surprise as Pat Gelsinger, CEO of the company, literally embraced Kubernetes when he introduced the new Tanzu product line, thus justifying Pivotal, Heptio, Bitnami, etc.. acquisitions and also realizing finally that Kubernetes is a must have even for VMware.

The company announced just a few days before the conference the acquisition of Pivotal for $2.7 billion. Tanzu is a product and service portfolio to build and manage software on Kubernetes:

Project Pacific, unveiled at the same time, is essentially Kubernetes in vSphere with Kubernetes becoming the control plane in vSphere.
Tanzu Mission Control, remember Apollo mission 50 years ago, to offer consistency and control to all Kubernetes clusters wherever they run.

Gelsinger confirmed and insisted that this initiative is very strategic and one of the most important change in vSphere over last few years. Obviously, the resistance to Kubernetes pressure is very difficult as the project and adoption are very rapid and compelling, it also confirms the shake of a commercial software giant by open source again.

We realize also that VMware is also one of the top acquirer in the industry with 48 acquisitions in total (see the official VMware acquisitions page) with already 8 in 2019 and 6 in 2018. It illustrates that the growth and innovation comes for a large part from M&As and its difficulty to adapt itself and jump into new trends and waves. Kubernetes is a perfect example of that.

To summarize, we select 4 key topics VMware insisted on:

Kubernetes see above,
Multi and Hybrid Cloud with VMware Cloud on Dell EMC (aka Project Dimension), vSphere and vSAN updates with Magna initiative (AI/ML to drive the next/future data center) and container-ready via the Container Native Storage model,
Security and Networking with the acquisition of Carbon Black for $2.1 billion, NSX family and AppDefense,
and Workplace ONE.

On the expo, we noticed the presence of Infinidat, Rubrik, Cohesity, Datrium, Redis Labs, Micron, Mellanox, Kaminario, StorONE, Lightbits Labs at VMware and Micron booth, Commvault, Storcentric on the Nexsan booth with Vexata array, Tintri by DDN, iXsystems, DataCore, Asigra and Minio in addition to the gorillas IBM, HPE, Hitachi Vantara, NetApp, Dell EMC, Intel, Pure Storage and WDC ,and many of them made announcements. Rubrik will organize its 1st user conference in May 2020 in Chicago.

We were surprised, and for sure we’re not the only ones, to see a Maxta booth after the complete failure of the company. Some people at the booth confirmed that almost the previous team left and now the control is in Huayun Data Group hands.

It was also the really first event for Clumio as the company exits from the dark and unveiled its Enterprise Backup-as-a-Service 1.0 offering.

CloudSimple was on Microsoft Azure booth, but also on 7 others, demonstrating its cross-cloud vMotion. Very interesting solution, we even anticipate that the company will be acquired in the next 18 months.

We noticed some absences like Nutanix and Oracle with their own conference soon, in Barcelona, Spain, for the first, and OpenWorld in 2 weeks for the second. Also Acronis, HYCU, Hedvig, Reduxio, Actifio, Datera, Nasuni, RStor, Pavilion or Violin to name a few. Real surprise for some of them as virtualization, container, hybrid/multi- cloud and Kubernetes are central in their strategy.

Among the tons of announcements here is a selection: