The countdown to VMworld 2012 is underway, and before the event opens and the frenetic pace of one of the largest shows of the year begins, our experts at SunGard who are attending are weighing in with their thoughts on what this year’s event will offer.
SunGard’s team will be meeting customers and partners at booth #2322 to discuss SunGard solutions, such as recovering hybrid environments, and sitting in on a number of breakout sessions across many VMworld tracks. Read what our experts have to say about the technologies that are capturing their attention, and what they’re looking forward to most.
And with so much to learn from both the business and the technology perspectives, the dizzying array of VMworld options can be a lot to process. But have no fear: SunGard’s experts also offer their tips on how to extract the most value from your time at VMworld.
Janel Ryan, Director, Product Marketing, Managed Services (@janel_ryan)
The main reason I look forward to attending VMworld is to expand my knowledge about trends, technologies and competitors. VMworld 2012 can give attendees a good sense of what’s happening in the industry from the variety of breakout sessions. Breakouts provide valuable insight into the latest technology and tools and the interaction with peers and customers provides a view into what businesses are looking for.
I’ll be attending sessions which focus on technology use cases, as well as those I believe can give me more insight into technology adoption.
I’m looking forward to talking to attendees about SunGard Cloud Services. We have such a great solution set for enterprise customers whether they are looking to address primary or recovery environments.
My best tips for attendees are to go to the keynotes, and plan your days, but don’t overfill them with sessions. You need to keep time in between to talk to peers, analysts, customers, and others to hear what they are thinking. It is best to arrange meetings in advance since the show gets so busy.
Ron LaPedis, Workforce Continuity Specialist (@SunGard_RonL)
At this year’s VMworld, there are many sessions on not only backing up your data and servers to the cloud, but also on keeping your primary and backup data secure. It can seem like a simple question – “Do YOU know if your backup systems and data are secure?” – but there are times when the answer is unclear.
It’s important to talk to customers about how to integrate. VMware and NetApp, VMWare and EMC… servers and storage go together like peanut butter and jelly. The message we want to send is, unless you have an integrated system which backs up both in sync, you might get stuck when trying to recover.
What intrigues me about VMworld 2012 is there seems to be a lot more sessions on private cloud this year. That leads me to wonder whether enterprises have been scared away from the public cloud by some of the recent outages and security breaches that have made news.
Afshin Shams, Enterprise Cloud Specialist (@ashams99)
VMworld is a great chance to connect with peers and users of virtualization technology to understand what’s happening in the industry from an adoption and needs perspective.
By meeting with other providers, you get a sense of what their offerings are in the marketplace and how they are leveraging virtualization to respond to the needs of the customers. Conversely, by speaking with users and customers, it helps me understand what is most critical for them in the way they are using virtualization, why they need the technology, and what they are seeking from virtualization in the near future. Lastly, listening to VMware’s executives talk about the future direction of the technology and the company helps us understand their views of customer needs.
I’m also excited to talk about SunGard’s cloud offering for both production and recovery purposes. This is most relevant to the users and attendees at the show and I hope to engage with them about our cloud offering. I want to talk about how SunGard leverages the #1 virtualization platform to deliver its Cloud Services.
The best tip I can provide to other attendees is definitely to plan your days in terms of sessions, and leave room to meet with customers and prospects that you know are attending. Keep the meetings interactive and embrace the energy and vibe of this exciting event—and arrange meetings in advance as there are many other vendors trying to do the exact same thing. There’s no more exciting and electric place to talk to about our cloud services than at a show where everyone has the same interests –virtualization, where is it now, how customers can do more with it, and where is it going.
JP Blaho, Director of Product Marketing (@BlahoJP)
For me, VMworld is really about checking out different companies with different approaches to business. I look forward to exploring the trade floor to discover new ideas and technologies. It is the spirit of innovation that gets me excited about this event.
This is my first VMworld conference, so I plan to attend a variety of sessions. My background is around network security and storage, and I do plan to attend a couple sessions that talk about these markets. I think that attending some of the seminars, and listening to other vendors present helps validate my approach to technology. It also helps, early on, to identify business opportunities so that we can explore features and functionality to enhance our own service offering roadmaps.
I’m most excited to talk to people at the show about SunGard’s Security-as-a-Service (SaaS). Security is oftentimes perceived as an unwanted necessity. I think with some of the new cloud-hosted services coming out, like Log & Threat Management, security becomes less of a bottleneck in the network, thus becoming a significant advantage over traditional network security solutions.
Since this is my first VMworld, I am going to follow the same personal rules I have for conferences like RSA and Interop. Plan your sessions first. Map out the vendors you want to visit in the Expo Hall, and probably most important, remember to set my “Out of Office” message on my email. That way, I can focus on all things VMworld for a few days.
Derek Siler, Senior Product Manager, Recovery Services (@PhillyTechPM)
I’m attending VMworld to learn about our clients’ recovery requirements for their virtualized environments. I’m also interesting in discovering how clients are evaluating releasing VM production and DR workloads to the cloud.
The event also offers a great opportunity to speak with IT decision makers on how they are addressing production and recovery requirements on their virtualized environments.
I’ll be attending several sessions for application virtualization for customer’s ERP apps. As far as SunGard’s presence at booth #2322, I’m most excited to share with customers our Recover2Cloud for Site Recovery Manager (R2C-SRM) and how we can protect their production VMs economically and resiliently.
My recommendation for VMworld attendees: network, plan in advance, and don’t overbook yourself!
