It’s that time of year again… End of summer means my hot trip to Vegas for the annual VMworld conference where Actifio will be participating in a variety of activities. This is the 14th conference year and the amazement doesn’t stop. When it started in 2004, VMworld drew 1600 curious geeks. Most of us had no idea what virtualization would become and what little we knew of it was enough not to trust it. That first conference wasn’t a big deal. There was little breaking news, and they didn’t even have a rock band!
Later in 2004, EMC acquired VMware and people began to pay attention. But virtualization skeptics remained unconvinced while we argued about the definition of cloud – or its viability. It took some time for the magnitude of the changes to register. But register they did. This year, VMworld attendance is expected to pass 23,000 and feature a show floor that you’d be hard pressed to cover superficially in a couple of days.
After server virtualization we quickly pushed to new ideas. Why not virtualize networks, storage, memory and, as Actifio has done, virtualize data? All this virtualization has not only changed physical data centers; it’s also extended amazing new business possibilities in the cloud.
So, we come to this conference each year expecting new things and Day One didn’t disappoint. A packed general session, “Technology Superpowers” featured VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger showing off his VMware tattoo. His talk was all about the conference theme of shaping technology to act as a force for good. He talked about VMware’s 20th anniversary and what it has helped IT to accomplish in cloud, mobile, AI/machine learning and Edge/IoT, as well as what he expects will be VMware’s next act—the multi-cloud era with the fusion of hybrid cloud and public cloud.
Pat had a special guest, CEO of AWS, Andy Jassy who announced a new Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) on VMware. This is an intriguing announcement in Actifio’s mind, and we are wondering how customers will protect those on-premises RDS instances. We think Actifio can help those customers who will be adopting this new technology, so stay tuned! There was plenty of additional learning, excitement and fun throughout the day, which included spending some time with our friends at IBM in their cool skatepark-themed booth.
Why were we hanging out in the IBM booth, you may ask? Well, the big news from Actifio this week is a new joint cyber security offering with IBM Resiliency Services.
On the fun side of things, we ended Monday by hosting a great networking event at Topgolf Las Vegas. We had a sellout crowd of friends new and old. On Tuesday, we hosted an exclusive steak dinner with a fantastic group of customers, partners, and prospects at Cut in the Venetian. The sendoff of the week was our fearless CMO, Brian Reagan, tackling the tough questions on theCUBE with our friends from SiliconANGLE.
Overall, I’d say it was great week for Actifio at VMworld 2018! Personally, I met with many partners, customers, prospects, and influencers and it was great to share the Actifio story with them. Of course, I had a lot of fun at our events too, but it was even better hearing the positive reaction from all the folks we engaged with this week!