As has been the case for the last two years, my first twodays of this VMWorld were spent in the Partner Technical Advisory Board.  This board is made up of the top engineersand architects of the top 1% of all VMware North America partners, butrepresent almost 50% of all the revenue brought to VMware from its NorthAmerican partners.  Needless to say, it’sa great group to be a part of, and it has been my honor to sit on this board forthe fourth time.

The first day (Sunday) was desktop based.  Unfortunately, pretty much all of theinformation presented was repeat from back in February when PTAB last met atPartner Exchange.  It was kicked off byVittorio Viarengo, VMware VP of Desktop Product Management.  He explained that the delay in deliveringView 4.5 was purely about the quality of the product, as well as covering someof the new features.  He also stated thatthere will be a stronger emphasis on assessments prior to the proof of conceptfor VDI deployments.  The rest of thespeakers proceeded to dig deeper into the View 4.5 features and a fewconversations about features in future releases, including a look into the EndUser Computing and Project Horizon concepts that are being introduced this yearat VMWorld.

Carl Eschenbach, VMware’s EVP of Worldwide Sales, stopped byto greet us, and ended up staying for nearly 45 minutes.  It was a great discussion that helped todefine how VMware’s partners need to adjust our business models to incorporatethe introduction of the cloud.

The second day (Monday) was cloud based.  The discussions on this day were farbetter.  We received a lot of futures,and it seemed that the product managers were definitely listening to ourinput.  The highlight was an “imagine yourselftwo years in the future” discussion of SRM features that really showed thevalue of PTAB for both the members and VMware. There was also a live demonstration of vCloud Director by Eddie Dinel(who also did the keynote demonstration).

Definitely a great start to VMWorld.  The only major issue was the fact thatVMWorld included sessions and labs on Monday, which resulted in the PTABmembers missing an entire day of conference goodness.

Day 2 of PTAB was based mostly around Desktop virtualization.    

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.

Yesterday was the first day of VMware Partner Exchange, and was lucking enough to be invited to join in on the Partner Technical Advisory Board (PTAB).  Obviously I can’t go into too much detail, but I can tell you that there were about 30 or so of us in a room together for about 13 hours straight.   I left with a headache, but I’m not sure if that was because of the fact the room was 60F, getting 4 hours of sleep, intensity of content and discussion, or the uncomfortable chair that started killing my back after about 8 hours.

Overall, it was a great experience.  It was a series of presentations that generated a lot of great discussions and introduced us to some of VMware’s future products and features.  They even had a couple of presenters that would throw out ideas just to see if it was a feature we thought was worth developing.  Meeting some of the elites within the partner community was definitely a highlight as well.

I’m really hoping to be honored with a request at VMWorld.  Special thanks to Sean and Don at VMware for nominating me and Danny for selecting me for this great opportunity.