VMworld 2007: bigger, broader and Viridian
VMworld 2007 kicked off with Diane Greene, Pat Gelsinger (Intel) and Hector Ruiz (AMD) speaking to what must have been 10,000 people in the Moscone Center. The crowd was larger than the hey-day of JavaOne. Greene announced some new items; Gelsinger dove into the benchmarks to show the virtues of Intel quad-core to provide better reliability, scale and energy efficiency; and Ruiz showed some interesting data around server reduction and the associated power reduction. Scott Lowe covered the keynote in more detail. It was a good opening session, and I’m looking forward to seeing John Chambers tomorrow.
The booth activity has been non-stop. I'll post photos in a bit.
With today’s news of a pending CTP of Viridian, the crowd seems interested to kick the tires. I had one customer from Sanofi-Aventis tell me how much they were paying in license and training fees for VMware to do server consolidation and basic management, and he was real happy to use SCVMM because his team could use existing skill sets and get moving faster.
Viridian was an often discussed item at last night's Giants baseball game. And the other hot topic was about our future work with Citrix and XenSource. Thankfully we had a couple people attend the game from Citrix and XenSource. Today we announced a next step with Citrix, but not really too revealing for the future. A number of VMworld attendees asked me today about Citrix's acquisition of XenSource. I'm not so sure why people would ask about this before the deal even closes (likely month+ away) - we can't talk joint roadmap with them until the deal closes. But it makes for good banter in the booth and over adult beverages.
Patrick
