Five key takeaways from VMworld 2020

Security, acquisitions and singing partner praises all took centre stage at the vendor’s first virtual partner event. CRN unpacks the key messages from the annual event

Like most vendor events this year, VMworld looked a little different as travel and social restrictions caused by the coronavirus meant in-person conferences had to be replaced by virtual keynotes and sessions.

Taking place from 29 September to 1 October, VMworld saw the vendor make a host of product and partnership announcements that it said will cater to the "new way of working".

"We just experienced the largest workforce migration in the history of humanity," CEO Pat Gelsinger said during his keynote address.

"Billions of people switched to a flexible distributed model, and most of us did it overnight. As we blur the boundary between work life and home life, the digital workspace has taken centre stage."

CRN parses through the news for the key takeaways for partners.

UK market is keeping up with European neighbours

As COVID-19 continues to cause chaos to economies around the world, the UK market has an additional challenge to contend with: Brexit.

Jean Philippe Barleaza, VMware's EMEA channel boss, told CRN that he hasn't seen any difference in the market's behaviour compared to its European peers.

"The UK is our largest market in EMEA, and so it's our number one priority when we look at the size of the market, as well as the strategic positioning of UK customers and how they influence other European customers when they do adopt technology to solve their business challenges," he said.

"The response to the crisis resulted in one of the largest proof of concept exercises that we've ever seen before, and that is making us optimistic for the future.

"I can't comment on Brexit at this moment in time, but I can say that, from our perspective, the business behaviour in the UK is not fundamentally different from what I see in the other countries."

He singled out UK partners for praise in how they handled the initial scurry of customers pivoting to remote working, as well as shifting their own business models as a result of the pandemic.

"If you look at our business in the UK, we had a very reasonable first half of the year," he noted.

"I was incredibly impressed with the partners adapting - in the UK specifically - and demonstrating their ability to pivot and meet customer demand.

"It was quite interesting to see how they invested in new capabilities, going to new non-traditional business models and pushing them."

‘Security is getting a lot of attention at VMware'

Gelsinger declared that VMware is now a "billion-dollar plus" security business, off the back of its Carbon Black acquisition last year.

Security was very much central to the vendor's announcements this year, as execs Gelsinger and COO Sanjay Poonen hammered home the range of protections VMware now offers that can accommodate the needs of the "distributed workforce".

Central to its security announcements at the event was the newly-launched Carbon Black Cloud Workload, which is intended to strengthen customers' security posture in their workloads and can run in virtualised, private and hybrid cloud environments.

COO Poonen declared that the scramble to the crowd this year has meant that legacy applications are "no longer sufficient" for customers that now use the cloud as part of their computing infrastructure.

To counter this the vendor also announced its Future Ready Workforce solutions, which combines its Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), digital workspace and endpoint security capabilities.

The Future Ready Workforce solutions combine its secure access service edge (SASE), Digital Workspace and Endpoint Security capabilities to help IT manage and monitor more secure access to an app on a device.

"Many of the traditional legacy endpoint protection solutions that have been focused primarily on just laptops have started to fade for a variety of reasons: they get acquired or people leave or they've not been built for the cloud," he said during a press Q&A with Gelsinger.

"We think this next generation of endpoint and workload security that Carbon Black brings us an opportunity to get to 100 to 150 million endpoints.

"The notion of not just workload security but now workspace security has taken on even more importance because of COVID and the pandemic.

"People are distributed and they need the trifecta of [app management platform] Workspace ONE, Carbon Black and VeloCloud to have optimised distributed workforce security from home. So security, in general, is getting a lot of attention at VMware."

Making pals and partnerships

Partnerships between VMware and Nvidia and Zscaler were also made public at the event.

The vendor is expanding on its existing relationship with cloud security specialist Zscaler as part of its SASE offering. The extended partnership will combine VMware's SD-WAN and Secure Access with Zscaler's Internet Access into a "best of breed" SASE solution.

Jay Chaudhry, chairman and CEO of Zscaler, said in a written statement that the pandemic has caused organisations to review their IT infrastructure and adapt it to suit the current working environment.

"The pandemic created market dynamics that require organisations to transform their IT infrastructure to meet the business needs of the new normal," he said.

"Having an adaptable and flexible approach to connecting and securing access to corporate resources can be the difference between success and failure.

"Zscaler and VMware have a longstanding partnership of delivering best-in-class networking and security solutions for large global enterprises. We are extending this relationship to combine our proven, industry-leading solutions so customers can accelerate adoption of SASE and not have to compromise on networking or security."

Meanwhile, VMware's Gelsinger sat down with Nvidia's boss Jensen Huang to discuss their partnership which he declared would "democratise" AI for enterprise.

The venture will see the virtualisation leader pair up with the chipmaker to deliver an end-to-end enterprise platform for AI and a "new architecture" for the datacentre, the cloud and the edge that will use Nvidia's data processing unit (DPU) to support current and next-gen applications.

"This really is the biggest of anything we've ever done and it's completely transformative for both of our companies," said Huang.

"We're going to bring the power of AI to every enterprise; we're going to bring the Nvidia AI computing platform and our AI application frameworks onto VMware.

"These computers are learning from data to write software that no humans can; we want to be able to put all of this capability in the hands of all the companies so that they can automate their business and products with AI."

SaltStack acquisition adds open source ‘credibility'

VMware announced its fifth acquisition of the year so far with the purchase of US-based automation firm SaltStack which will "complete our automation story", it claimed.

Speaking during the media Q&A chief exec Gelsinger elaborated on the rationale for the new addition, claiming that customers want more streamlining of products and integration into the stack.

"We have seen more and more customers saying ‘I just want that to be more integrated into the solution set'," he told the press.

"Broadly customers like the idea of fewer, more strategic vendors. We'd hear ‘I'm tired of these point products and solutions that you're expected to integrate and support and managed properly - just make it part of the stack'.

"This is a great way for us to further enrich the multi-cloud and the cloud automation stack and we expect a very natural sales and integration cycle for the Salt team."

SaltStack also has a "vibrant" open source community that lends credibility to VMware's own ambitions in the space, he added.

"They bring enormous open source credibility; the Salt community is one of the most active communities today - I was really surprised as we were looking at how vibrant a community it is," he said.

"Our commitments to open source in a wide variety of areas, particularly around Kubernetes and Project Tanzu, but now we have another area in automation, furthering our commitment that we want to be one of the leading providers of open source technologies in the enterprise space today and into the future."

'We want to be predictable for partners'

The coronavirus crisis, particularly the early days of lockdown, reminded VMware of the importance of their partner ecosystem, said EMEA channel head Barleaza.

He told CRN that the vendor is "committed" to ensuring that VMware is profitable for partners.

"We really want to be predictable for the partners and bring them clarity around the VMware vision and this event is really one of the flagship moments of the year where we can do that," he said.

"We are committed to making sure that VMware is profitable for our partners, not only in the transaction space, but also in the services one. We want to make sure they are protected when they do invest, and when they find opportunities, they know that we're going to be working on those together and they're going to have access to other VMware assets.

"We are putting a lot of effort into improving our processes, value and commission and simplicity. The voice of the partner is critical because they are closer to the customers than anybody."