Update from VMware Explore 2022

Hey everybody, this is Chris Brandt here with a quick update on VMware's annual show.

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Last week I went to VMworld, or as it is now called VMware Explore. I have to say it was a bit of a disaster, but I will get into that in a bit.

To start with, VMware Explore was held in San Francisco at the Moscone center. Not sure this was a great decision. They may have felt if they stay local, more companies will be interested in sponsoring, and exhibiting. For everyone not from the bay area, it was very expensive. Hotels were at a premium for sure. San Francisco is also dealing with a bit of a crime crisis at the moment, which has been getting a lot of news coverage.

All of this, plus a lingering pandemic, a bunch of Monkey Pox, and an uncertain economy meant that this event wasn't as well attended as previous ones. Additionally, a lot of uncertainty about the Broadcom acquisition was expressed, and this may have played into the lower attendance as well.

It was a dramatically smaller show. It reminded me of some of the regional events that they do. Vendors I talked with said that they had many good interactions, so maybe with less volume, you get a more interested crowd. I do know that this event used to sell out long before the show, but this year you could buy tickets at the door.

The exhibit floor seemed to be less than half of what it was previously. The main focus was around storage, Horizon products and visibility solutions. The usual cohort of smaller vendors just wasn't there this year. I'm not sure if this speaks to market conditions, or an erosion of the VMware ecosystem.

While the exhibit floor was lackluster, the sessions seemed to be buzzing with activity. I think the attendees were really focused on the education aspect of this show, and there were a lot of sessions for people to attend. The sessions I attended were good if not packed. I generally heard good feedback from people about their sessions.

VMware had a handful of announcements. They doubled down on cloud, citing an IDC analysis that showed 400 percent growth in cloud native apps over the past 3 years from a total of 72 Million in 2019 to an estimated 310 Million cloud native apps today.

Some of the big announcements were VMWare Image Builder which is a SaaS service that allows customers to package verify and publish across multiple Kubernetes providers, talking a lot of the manual work out of building for multiple platforms.

They also expanded and improved the VMware Application Catalog with more integration with OpenShift, greater OS support, and a bunch of additions to the catalog.

They also discussed how they are growing the VMware Marketplace as well, but not a ton of big flashy new stuff this year.

My plan for this year's show was to meet with some of the vendors and get some interviews. I was able to interview O.J. Wolanyk from Kentik, but shortly after a quick interview with him, I put my microphones down and somebody walked off with them while I wasn't looking. They were brand new and that was the first time I used them. So, unfortunately, the recording was also lost when the mics were taken, but I did have some audio off the camera, so please excuse the crowd noise.

Unfortunately, without the mics, it was a bit difficult to do any more interviews, but in all honesty, there weren't many new vendors to talk with.

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I will see you in the next one.

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