Being held so soon after its conference in San Francisco, VMworld Europe was likely to be a more subdued affair, or certainly have less product releases.
This would have been true had Dell not just entered into an agreement to acquire EMC. With no Pat Gelsinger during the first keynote, it was up to Carl Eschenbach, COO to take the helm.
With a brief nod to the elephant in the room, addressing the acquisition seemed necessary to assuage any fears that may be held by partners in the VMware ecosystem.
A short video from Michael Dell, said: "Our combined power will allow us to win in the digital economy…we look forward to working closely with VMware."
VMware which is 80% owned by EMC, or by Dell shortly, is remaining a publicly traded company, Eschenbach said.
Moving on swiftly, the company re-iterated its focus on hybrid cloud, particularly stating, ‘One cloud, any application, and any device.’
The rest of the keynote felt like a prolonged sales pitch. A steady pattern of informing the audience of a challenge being faced, followed by the reassurance that VMware offers a solution. This would typically be followed by a customer story and a demo of how the solution works – rinse and repeat.
Everything was focused around hybrid. Each presenter gave an overview of how the company is simplifying deployment and simplifying the use of hybrid.
During the selling of the benefits of hybrid, there were some remarks made that played down the value of public cloud.
Around deploying mobile apps it was said that doing this in the public cloud is complicated. This is due to the need to access things like a business’s ERP system, something that could cause compliance and security issues.
What VMware will be hoping is that customers choose not just to build public or private, but go hybrid instead.
Raghu Raghuram, EVP GM, Software Defined Data Centres, said: "It is not sufficient to just build a private cloud infrastructure, or just to build a public cloud infrastructure. The best way is a unified hybrid cloud."
