VMworld 2010: Oh My Moscone!
Posted on Tue, Sep 21, 2010
By Katie
San Francisco’s Moscone Center is always a buzz of conference activity, but in the past month, a number of our clients (and Metis) have walked the center’s floors and hosted attendees at their booths. At two industry shows, VMworld and Intel Developer Forum, our clients interacted with partners, customers, vendors, competitors, analysts, bloggers and media.
From August 30 to September 2, virtualization dominated the streets south of Market at VMworld 2010. Four of our clients – Aprius, Embotics, FalconStor and VM6 Software – were there, each discussing their solutions and opinions around desktop virtualization, data center optimization, virtualization management, I/O virtualization, and public and private cloud computing.
More than 17,000 people attended VMworld. Conferences in the past few years have been doing any and everything they can to attract a crowd, generally to no avail. VMworld is always an exception.
So what are some of our key take aways from VMworld?
- Virtualization is still very much an enabling technology but the discussions focused on management and creating public, private and hybrid clouds. We are now seeing a wave of technologies that promise increased ROI and easier management, with varied approaches to adoption.
- Rubbing shoulders with so many companies makes it all the more critical that your message resonates and stands out – and not just in a marketing way – but as a tangible approach that speaks directly to customers and solves real problems.
- There are not enough hours in the day to consume the sessions, labs, content, conversations, parties, videos, Foursquare specials, Tweets, pictures and more. Check out the Wikibon livecast videos for a great review.
- Happy hours and dinners are highly anticipated and well-deserved events. However, you may kick yourself the next day if you stay out past 1 a.m.
The energy associated with an event like VMworld is palpable. You're surrounded by braniacs, industry leaders, and technology innovation from emerging companies. It's easy to get caught up in the spirit of it. This blog post from Virtual Insanity gives a great overview of the numbers behind VMworld. After taking it all in, it still excites the data center team here at Metis to talk about it three weeks later. We look forward to next year's event!
Even if you didn’t attend, thanks to real-time updates from Twitter, YouTube and blogs, you could watch the action unfold. Check out the Twitter updates that are still resulting from VMworld.