Last week I attended VMware’s World wide sales kick off event where all of VMware’s sales organization gathered in New Orleans to learn about the vision for the future, celebrate the wins of the past (6 Billion Revenue this year!) and network with our peers.
“Networking ” with my teammates @FPFL @ThevCACGuy & @inkysea
What a great even that was, started with VMware volunteers for “Habitat for humanity” event where 300 of our finest went to build houses for people who are in need.
Hey, I maybe drinking from my company’s KoolAid but as @virtualJad says “its a great KoolAid!” . I don’t know any other company that is spending so much time and energy on different charity and giving back to the community initiatives, where people that are involved in different volunteer work are being praised and where each employee can take 40 hours a year to volunteer for community work and there is a lot more. This is part of the company’s DNA and I am very proud to be in it.
Celebrating with a local gospel choir after a hard day’s work
With that in mind there were quite a few major announcements in PEX this week:
- vSphere 6.0 with vVols, SMP FT, Cross vCenter vMotion, Long distance vMotion and more. read about it here on Adam Eckerle AKA @eck79 blog
- VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) – VMware’s own openstack deployment that is free for ENT+ customers! read about it here.
- VAN 6.0v – all flash support, new SPBM capabilities, multiple racks support and more which you can read about here
These announcements are great and shows the extent of effort being put to integrate the solutions into a unified solution stack and to embrace new trends in the market instead of just trying to kill them, VMware does not see OpenStack, off prem cloud or containers as threats but more as opportunity to help our customers achieve their goals (read a small preview into our vision for containers in this blog post by Kit Colbert) .
And that brings me to the statement of “Openess” I titled this post with, VMware is the company that is the most OPEN out there, period.
When it comes down to promoting a culture of giving back to the community and volunteer work, when it comes down to embracing new technologies that might seem as a threat in the beginning but are also a great opportunity to solve real world problems for our customers, VMware is not afraid of making bold decisions, VMware is not afraid to dare.
Cheers
Niran