VMworld 2020 - Virtual Edition
While it may be a little early to talk about a “post Covid-19” world, like many things the tech conference scene has almost certainly changed for good. And when I say “for good” I mean for the foreseeable future. VMworld 2020 will be completely digital experience for the first time ever. Probably no surprise that a mass gathering of somewhere in the vicinity of 23,000 plus nerds was a no starter. What is perhaps a little surprising is that they’ve announced the General Pass will be free of charge.
Historically attendance to VMworld has involved a trip to the US (Las Vegas or San Francisco) or Europe (Barcelona) which could make it hard to justify if you’re not paying your own way. Factoring in cost of the conference itself, travel and of course accommodation it was no small feat. I was fortunate enough to head over to the Las Vegas event in 2017 thanks to vBridge and found it to be an amazing experience.
The vBridge IaaS platform is of course based on VMware’s core virtualization product offering, the VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) and vCenter Server. These continue to be leading technologies in the world of virtualization despite being only a small part of VMware’s portfolio these days. A conference like VMworld is the perfect place to expand knowledge on these foundation technologies and discover new opportunities for growth and expansion.
This year’s conference is scheduled to run over two days and kicks off on September 30th at 8:00AM with registration having opened in late June. If virtualization or technology futures in general are of interest I’d suggest you head over now and register here. An added bonus of this being a virtual event means no dramas with missing out on sessions due to limited seating and the long days traipsing all over and around a conference facility won’t be quite so hard on your feet!
There will still be marquee Keynotes with industry leading figures and no doubt plenty of product announcements and futures. The technical deep dives are always a favorite and will cover a breadth of topics along with the usual breakout sessions, the Solutions Exchange will be present in some form, along with business focused sessions and hands-on labs. The content has been broadly grouped into the following 7 categories:
• Vision and Innovation
• App Modernization
• Digital Workspace
• Intrinsic Security
• Virtual Cloud Network
• Multi-Cloud
• Telco 5G
VMware have actually been running virtual conferences for quite some time all be it at a smaller scale, and having participated in a number I can say the quality of both the production itself and the technical content will be very good. The social side of the conference will clearly be a different experience to that of physically being there - the meeting of industry figures, vendors, friends, and customers alike but we've all had some experience of dealing with that in recent times.
Final thoughts
I believe this will be a fascinating event and I encourage you to take a few minutes to have a look and see what you can find of interest. If physically travelling to one of these events wasn't really on the cards, see this a great opportunity to still experience one of the best technology conferences around.
Links: VMworld 2020 - Registration and VMworld 2020 - FAQ