I personally anticipated Thursday’s general session mostly because I like to hear Carl Eschenbach speak. Carl started as a SE for EMC a long time ago. He’s very comfortable speaking to a large room and it shows. The session was in the same large room as the first which houses about 4,000 people.
Thursday started off like this:
The usual disclam was posted about forward looking features. Dale Irvin started the general session with a few jokes about his experiences the night before. Funny stuff to wake the crowd. First up was Carl Eschenbach, President, Customer Operations.
Carl begins by describing how the name of partner exchange was chosen and a recap of why we are here. Last week, Vmware had 3,300 of their worldwide sales force come to Las Vegas to train them on the company message. This week is the “second week” of vmware’s kickoff sales training as per Carl. He talks about some of the numbers: 63 countries represented, 3,300 attendees. Carl asks the top partner award winners to come on stage. The partners represented are from a variety of awards, Best Infrastructure Partner, Best BC/DR Partner, Best Distributor, etc.
Carls then goes on to discuss some of the awards that vmware has won in 2010. Continue reading »
Paul described 2010 as a breakout year for VMware. VMware accomplished $2.9 billion in revenue, up 41 percent over 2009. He mentioned that international revenues were up 43 percent to $1.4 billion. He then thanks the audience, composed of partners and resellers, for that achievement. Paul also thanks the sponsors for the event including EMC, HP, NetApp, Cisco among others. After the thank yous are completed, Paul asks a rhetorical question of the crowd specifically if they know what customers want. Paul says that customers want greater business agility while improving efficiency. He says that in the next five years there will be a transformation in IT. Specifically around Integration and Automation, New Application Platforms, and Device independence in what he referred to as a “post-Windows world” (love that term). He reviews the chart of new server deployments by year and highlights 2009. That was when VM deployments surpassed physical server deployments. He thanks the partners again and exits the stage.