The VMworld 2012 Europe event kicked off in Barcelona yesterday with more than 8 000 delegates in attendance.
Delivering the keynotes were VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger and CTO Stephen Herrod, who both noted that the event came at a time when IT was experiencing massive changes from the days when the mainframe dominated, followed by the mini computer, then the PC/processor, the networked/distributed computing, and finally, virtual/cloud computing.
"Now we are in the cloud computing era, which is a very disruptive technology," Gelsinger pointed out. "We are coming from a time when IT was reactive, to become proactive, and now it's being innovative."
He explained that during the days when IT was reactive, it was mostly concerned with responding to business requests. When proactive, he added, it focused on increasing business agility. However, according to Gelsinger, being innovative can be a key business differentiator.
Gelsinger also pointed out that the 2012 edition of the event came at a time when there is an increase in the use of virtualised workloads.
"In 2008, we had about 25% virtual workloads, but in 2012, the number has grown to 60%," he said, adding that he expects the percentage to rise to 90% in the near future.
Among its innovative approaches to the changing IT landscape, Gelsinger pointed out that VMware introduced the software-defined data centre approach, which he said involves all infrastructure being virtualised and delivered as a service, while the control of this data centre is entirely automated by software.
According to VMware, the software-defined data centre is a unified data centre platform that helps organisations transform the way they deliver IT through automation, flexibility and efficiency.
It adds that the software-defined approach moves beyond traditional IT complexity and rigidity by liberating data centre services from the constraints of specialised hardware. Compute, storage, networking, security and availability services are pooled, aggregated and delivered as software, and are managed by software.
During his presentation, Herrod noted that the result is a data centre optimised for the cloud era, providing business agility, the highest SLAs for all applications, simpler operations and lower costs.
Gelsinger noted that VMware was also hosting the conference just after it completed some key acquisitions and business deals.
The company recently announced its biggest acquisition, Nicira, for $1.26 billion. "We have spent almost $2 billion on acquisitions this year, and this only shows our commitment to innovations," said Gelsinger.
On the other hand, said Gelsinger, VMware also recently killed off its VRAM licensing, instead choosing to focus on vSphere.
"As for the closure of VRAM, all I can say is you talked and we listened. We will always do our best to listen to our clients and partners."
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