View From The Floor - Kim Johnston Day 2 By VSM News Staff published: Wednesday, February 25 2009
On Cloud 9 on Day 2?
Blogging live from VMworld Europe 09 - Kim Johnston, VP of Marketing, Parallels
Evening on day 2 is often the most exhausting time of a 3
day conference: the jet lag is catching up with you, you've been on your feet
all day for two days, you "networked" a little too much the night before and
the last day of the event stretches ahead of you. This pretty much sums up my
state as I write this in the bar (free WiFi!) of the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, where I am staying
while I attend VMworld Europe.
Today offered more of the same as yesterday - a
comprehensive conference program, hand-on technical labs and the solutions
exchange. Many fellow attendees that I spoke to today commented on the lack of
‘new' news at this year's event by VMware. However, with that said, the
conference tracks are very busy. Clearly there is still a big focus on
education in the virtualization space at the moment, and it's interesting to
see how the focus of this is shifting toward cloud computing.
As I mentioned yesterday, this was reflected in Maritz's
opening keynote and has continued to be a strong theme for the event, with the
most notable highlight being our own CEO's presentation today, of course! Serguei
explained the opportunity cloud represents, painted the picture of the current
environment and recommended next steps for taking a slice of the $3.5 trillion
represented by the IT industry.
His main message? In order to compete with "uber clouds"
such as Google and Microsoft that currently spend $1 billion per quarter on
cloud, smaller organizations MUST partner up. The giants in the space do
not necessarily have the advantage as it's still early days, but the key for
other players surviving and thriving in such a competitive market is going to
be a combination of partnering, automating, virtualizing and standardizing.
Based on the variety of vendors in the solutions exchange,
there appears to be an endless number of interesting combinations of
partnerships, products and services for how we can all work together to provide
value to the market place. Now, I have to run - it's the main VMworld party
tonight and it promises to deliver me to "Cloud 9," though I suspect I'll be
"asleep by 9" instead! Here's to what day 3 and beyond will bring.
Visit Parallels at
VMworld Europe Booth #92.
Related Links:
VMworld Europe 2009 Coverage , Parallels
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