The final day of Partner Exchange started off with a final breakfast with a bunch of the attendees, some I met this week and some I have known in the past.  It was a fun time and I appreciate David Davis helping to arrange it.

The sessions I attended were merely okay.  The two most interesting had to do with best practices for Lab Manager and Capacity Planner.  Both are tools I hope to learn better, so the information presented was useful.

I had a great time once again at Partner Exchange and would like to thank everyone who helped to put it together.  The highlights for me personally were PTAB and the time spent conversing with other attendees, catching up with old friends and meeting new ones.  I look forward to more at VMWorld 2010 and Partner Exchange 2011.

Today I started with a meeting with LiquidWare Labs.  It was a great conversation and hopefully the beginning of a great partnership.  This unfortunately prevented me from attending the Steve Herrod keynote, which I have always looked forward to.  Based on what I’ve heard about his presentation it went as well as his previous keynotes.

After lunch I attended the Advanced View 4 Lab, which ended up actually being a Tech Preview of the next version of View.  This next version introduces many new features and some considerable changes to the interface and scalability of the product.  According to the lab instructors, they didn’t even get their hands on the code until three days before the conference and had to learn it while building the lab.  I have to say that I was very impressed with the product, the improvements they made and the stability of a product still in the Alpha stage.  This release has more features than View 4.0 had and is everything that View 4.0 should have been.  It will truly be a game changer.

After the lab I attended a presentation and demo of vCenter AppSpeed.  It is a very promising application that can help to pinpoint where latencies exist within a multi-tier application.  Check this one out.  It is implemented as a single OVF that clones itself to have a single collector on each host in the cluster along with a single vApp to coordinate all the collectors and provide the intelligence.

Meetings prevented me from attending the Partner Appreciation Party at the House of Blues.  From what I could see through the door and the stories from those who did attend, I don’t think I would’ve been able to enjoy it anyways.  28,000 people crammed into a restaurant didn’t seem too appealing to me to begin with.

Today is the day that the conference officially began (yes, on my third day of being at the conference).  I started with the keynote by Carl Eschenbach.  Here are a few of the noteworthy topics that were covered:

• VMware chose to have their global sales kickoff at Partner Exchange, because they consider the partner community to be a part of their sales force, not an extension of it.  This is a trend I’ve noticed as a partner, than VMware field sales will rely heavily on the partner sales teams.
• Microsoft had a 22% decline in attendance for their 2010 partner conference, while VMware had a 70% increase in attendance.  He then provided a direct jab at Microsoft: “You can’t make money on a free product”
• There are 28,000 attendees registered from 45 countries
• VMware has made large internal investments during 2009 to prepare to take advantage of the eventual upturn of the economy.  New investments included vSphere, the vCenter suite of products and View (and we haven’t seen all the investments come to market yet).  Many product awards were the result of these investments.
• VMware had revenue of $2.0B, up 8% from 2008
• Greater than 85% of their revenue is through the partner channel
• Virtualization and cloud computing are #1 & 2 (up from #2 & 14 in 2009) for CIOs (unfortunately I didn’t catch the source)
• As I mentioned in Sunday’s post, and was reiterated today, Cloud is not a destination, but an architecture that includes efficiency through automation, agility with management and freedom of choice
• Microsoft disrupted the Mainframe with PC/Client-Server computing.  According to Rich Jackson, VMware Chief Marketing Officer, it is “time to disrupt the mainframe of this decade”
• “Don’t be afraid of the cloud” –Carl Eschenbach, EVP Field Operations
• 85% of companies have or will deploy desktop virtualization in 2010
• More Microsoft applications virtualized at VMware than any other

All told, it was a very aggressive, “go and get ‘em” message.

The first session I attended was presented by John Dodge about View Design Methodology.  There was a lot of great information about both the current product and the next release that will definitely find its way into my best practices.

My second session was almost a repeat of the first, and was a bust for me.  It was unfortunate, because the title of the session held a lot of great possibility.

The third session was all about selling virtualization to the CFO, since this is the person who has to be convinced to write the check.  It was a great session that covered a topic I’m not entirely comfortable with, so it really helped to expand my horizon.  The essence of his message was that CFOs today don’t care about soft cost advantages, only the hard costs.  I don’t know if I entirely believe that (at least in the Midwest), but I think it is a great way to approach the discussion.

My last session for the day was about the customer journey to the cloud.  VMware has been interviewing a lot of their successful customers to find out what has worked well for them in implementing and expanding virtualization in their environments.  Many great lessons learned that will be finding their way into VMware Services documents.

After all the sessions were over, we had an informal vExpert meeting where we had the opportunity to speak with the person who runs the channel partner program at VMware.  We discussed the event, which her team puts on, and how they could better utilize social media and blogging.

Day number 3 was a very successful day at Partner Exchange.  Most of my sessions were worth attending, which always makes me happy.

Day 2 of PTAB was based mostly around Desktop virtualization.    

Though ThinApp is an awesome product, I have always thought that the application virtualization piece could use some work, especially packaging and deployment.  We discussed some cool new ways of dealing with ThinApp that cover both of those gaps.  It is now clear to me that VMware agrees and will soon be addressing it.

We also discussed the future roadmap of View and were able to see some of the features of the next release.  There are MANY new features/enhancements coming, and I would venture to say that it could be a bigger release than View 4.0.  Unfortunately, I can’t go into more detail than that.

We even had a surprise visit by EVP of Worldwide Field Operations Carl Eschenbach.  Mr. Eschenbach visited with the PTAB at our last meeting during VMWorld 2009, so I think his appearances really show the high level interest VMware has in this group.  For even more evidence, look no further than the fact that the Desktop, Server and PSO teams all chipped in to fund PTAB this year.

As always it was a great time for all involved.  VMware received a lot of frank opinions and advice, and the PTAB members were able to see a lot of VMware’s vision and learn a lot from each other.  Thank you to all who sponsored or attended the meeting with a special thank you to Danny Meeks and the other presenters who bravely walked across the hot coal pit that is the Partner Technical Advisory Board.  I look forward to doing it again soon.

I didn’t attend much of the Welcome Reception, but did spend a little time catching up with my coworkers and a few friends.  After the party I spent some time with a few new friends and a few old friends over drinks and a craps table.  Thanks for a fun evening guys!

VMware’s Partner Technical Advisory Board (PTAB) is an invite-only group of the top VMware partners (<2% of North American partners represented, but almost 50% of North America VMware partner revenue) that convene around VMWorld and PartnerExchange to discuss current and future VMware products.  It’s been a true honor to be able to sit on this board since PartnerExchange 2009.  Obviously everything is under a tight NDA (above and beyond the normal Partner NDA), so I can’t reveal a lot of the details of our discussions.

This first day of PTAB we spent talking primarily about datacenter products and more specifically about the Cloud.  We had, as always, a very lively conversation over all the topics presented to us.  A lot of information about future products or technologies was presented.  Part of each presentation involved the presenter (always from VMware) looking for our guidance and opinions for things that are on their roadmap.

We discussed futures for vStorage a couple of times, including a look into Storage DRS and potential off-loading of functions to the array.  There was lots of interesting things we discussed, and it was very clear that VMware is very focused on better integrating with the storage part of the hardware layer (and not just with EMC).

Most of the rest of the day was spent in some way discussing Clouds.  As we discussed the overview of how VMware plans to enable customers to migrate to a Cloud infrastructure, it became very clear that Cloud was driving many of the new features they are considering for future releases.  This is evident by VMware’s most recent acquisitions (SpringSource, Zimbra), enabling them to offer Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) as well as Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).  One of the most important takeaways I have from our Cloud discussions was that Cloud is not a product or technology, it’s an architectural approach, and VMware’s vision is to provide us the products and technologies to enable this approach.   It was great to finally see some of the Cloud vision start to take shape into actual products.

PTAB adjourned in time for us to attend the Super Bowl party being thrown by Cisco and EMC.  It was a great time where I was able to participate in several great discussions.   A big thanks to both companies for a great time.