I had a great time at VMworld 2011 Las Vegas this year. As I predicted in my last blog post, I met with loads of amazing people – too many to list out here, let alone in 140 on Twitter! I also saw some great technology in the solutions exchange, dropped in on some fascinating sessions, and of course enjoyed some excellent meals, drinks, and parties!
I was also very pleased to present on Extending the Value of Your VMware Solutions to Design, Deliver and Maintain Reliable, Mission-critical Virtualization and Cloud Services. I certainly was not there to ‘pitch’ any CA Technologies products or solutions (after all, I know that no one wants a sales pitch at a tradeshow like VMworld). Instead, I tried to provide strategic advice to the audience on how to look at their migration to cloud, and especially how to extend VMware’s excellent virtualization and cloud technologies.
My VMworld 2011 Las Vegas Presentation Agenda
With a smattering of additional tips and content from ‘Visible Ops – Private Cloud: From Virtualization to Private Cloud in 4 Practical Steps’, I talked about:
- how to match services with the right cloud using project and portfolio analysis based on models from Visible Ops – Private Cloud, a CA Technologies quadrant framework, Forrester Research’s Evaluating Application Fit With Cloud model, and Freeform Dynamics’ model from Applied Cloud Computing: A practical guide to identifying the potential in your environment
- how to think about your service portfolio, whether considering migrating existing services to a private VMware cloud, building new services on a public VMware cloud, dealing with business users who buy into 3rd-party cloud themselves, or even services that you may never migrate to the cloud
- how to leverage VMware to deliver both evolutionary cloud models built with virtualization, optimization, automation, orchestration, and dynamic IT; and with revolutionary models that deliver exponential benefits with a virtual business service, built on a virtual service fabric
- how to integrate complex service workflows, skillsets, and technologies, as well as incorporating NIST best practices including cloud service management and service-aware end-to-end application assurance to continually improve service quality, predictability, and costs
- how to apply critical security disciplines including Identity Management & Provisioning, Identity Federation & Single Sign-On, Web Access Management, Privileged User Management, Identity Compliance, and User activity reporting, whether to, from or for the cloud
- how to approach cloud as a transformation opportunity, so you don’t just do the same things in different ways, but fundamentally transform business and IT, delivering a ‘cloud of clouds’ with a broad technology ecosystem stocked with key VMware partners (like CA Technologies!)
You can check out my slides at the CA.com communities site, or over at SlideShare.
Overall, my session seemed to be very well received. A lot of people came up to me there and afterwards and told me how much they enjoyed my presentation, and how useful it was for them. I also enjoyed a great set of questions from the attendees immediately after the session. In fact, we were chatting so much we had to be ushered out so the next session could start.
Immediately afterwards I headed down to the CA Technologies booth, and really enjoyed talking with various practitioners and others at the book signing for ‘Visible Ops – Private Cloud: From Virtualization to Private Cloud in 4 Practical Steps‘ afterwards (with co-authors Jeanne Morain and Kurt Milne). I even had a professor in IT from NYU ask for a copy of my book! Cool! 🙂
All in all, I had a great time, made new friends, enjoyed great food, and even managed to avoid the possible downsides of VMworld!
I hope VMware Europe Copenhagen will be just as good – and I hope to see you there!