General Session – Realize Transformation

End User transformation

focus seems like it’s going to be on the end user space. How are we going to enable (and secure) our workforce in 2017. It looks like we are going to have some solid insights into where Dell is looking to go in the personal device space.

New product announcement: wireless laptop charging! I’ll take two. Coming June 1st

95% of all breaches start at the endpoint. OOF.

Nike and Dell working together on some really amazing tech. Dell Canvas allows user to have a much more tactile experience when designing. It’s going to be a very niche product, but really really cool.

Dell is projecting AR/VR to be a $45B business by 2025. It’s pretty obvious they’re going to go after this space. AR/VR is also a big focus on the solution floor. Daqri & Dell are partnering to come up with some interesting solutions in this space and hopefully using their scale to drive cost downward.

IoT and grocery. I know some people who might be interested in this part of the presentation. Grocery and supermarkets have a lot of capabilities with how they store products, but they typically just set it and forget it with their thermostats in the freezer & cold cases. Using IoT to track where your products are allows you to fine-tune thermostat controllers and realize real energy & waste savings. Grocery is just one use case, but the idea translates to other verticals. Dell has created a new Open initiative called EdgeXFoundry to start setting standards for the various IoT functions that happen at the edge.

VMware – Realize What’s Possible

My favorite part of the general session. It’s fanboy time. Here comes Pat Gelsinger.

Where are we headed… Technology is magic, or has the ability to create magic. We’ve seen this from mainframes->client/server->cloud and IoT and the edge are the next frontier, but it’s happening now.

LAUNCH ALERT: VMware Pulse IoT Center. Centralize management/security/operation of the network of IoT. Built on AirWatch/vRops/NSX.

Just like yesterday it appears that VMware has finally realized that their public cloud offerings … let’s just say they haven’t gone well. They are skipping to next gen of managing the devices at the edge and looking forward to Mobile Cloud.

Workspace one. make it simple for the consumer, but secure the enterprise. Seems like an overlap in the portfolio. How does ThinApp & AppVolumes play into this? Regardless VMware is taking a stronger focus on EUC this year.

Announcement time: VMware VDI Complete. Client devices from Dell, converged infrastructure, and vsphere. It’s VDI in a box. Super Sweet! Oh and here comes Sakac running on stage hooting. Awesome.

Cross cloud architecture. Finally we are getting somewhere. Don’t do the cloud, enable it! At last we get to see VMware Cloud on AWS! vRA is up next. Please just start giving vRA away! To go faster and compete with the public cloud, we need the tools. It’s a loss leader!

Announcement: VMware and Pivotal are announcing a collaboration to come up with a developer ready app platform with a focus on cloud native/serverless/micro-services/function.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry works with the most powerful cloud providers enabling Dev and IT to get to market faster, delivering value and time back to the business. It’s taken a couple of years to get there, but it seems like VMware is finally got a good handle on their micro-services & cloud portfolio. Today’s presentations are really exciting to see where we’re going.