VMworld 2011: Steve Herrod’s CTO Keynote
Dr. Steve Herrod has been called the James Bond of VMware, and he is indeed a confident and compelling speaker. He has an obvious brilliance and an easy style occasionally punctuated by humor. For his keynote he said he was going to do it with Post It notes and a Whiteboard. Of course, this was all on the big screen.
He started by pointing out that we’re moving from:
Servers -> Services
Devices -> People
Or…
Another way of putting this is:
- Devices
- Universal Access
- High Expectations
…or more susinctly: DUH.
"We can Simplify by extracting data from silos; Manage secure apps, data and access; Connect my apps, my data, my colleagues."
He then talked about Project ThinApp Factory would would encapsulate Windows apps for greater utility across all one’s devices: like Software as a Service (SaaS,) but with brokered access. Moving data services to the cloud is VMware’s "Project Octopus" seemingly an alternative to Dropbox. Interestingly, Dropbox did not have an exhibitor booth at the show, but Box.net did.
The project that got the most wow from the crowd was Horizon Mobile a way of putting upon a private mobile device (smartphone or tablet) a virtual work phone with work related apps and data — all managed by IT.
Project App Blast is the HTML5 of Windows and Mac applications run remotely. Imagine running Excel, real Excel and not a 3rd party app, on your iPhone.
There were many more things he shared, like VXLAN in cooperation with Cisco Systems. VXLAN is a way to solve a very specific IaaS infrastructure problem: replace VLANs with something that might scale better — like to over 16 million logical networks — ideal for building clouds.
Check out my tweets from the show with the tag #VMworld at my Twitter handle @billpetro
Thanks for coming along,
