Summary = I dare you to find more detailed notes on the keynote anywhere else. 🙂

In a large Venetian ballroom in the 5th floor of their convention area — smaller than the VMworld keynote but still a pretty large room with a couple thousand people.

Kickoff videos by EMC (customer videos), NetApp (Julie Parrish talking), Dell (guy who worries about storage growth during his morning run), Cisco – partner with us please.

Dramatic interpretation guy with dreads talking about looking in the clouds as a kid and seeing animals. “I’m all grown up but I still see clouds.” And…”It takes an entire village to raise one cloud.” Now I’m thinking how big a diaper do you need for a cloud…yes, I have little kids at home.

$3.77 Billion in Revenue – 32% YoY growth in 2011 but keeping a huge partner focus. Partners are 85% of this revenue.

More after the jump…

Many different kinds of partners – 2 years ago Service Provider space was pretty small — grown hugely and 4 out of top 5 SP’s by Gartner are VMware partners.

350,000 customers total — great number but lots more business in the world than that.

Enterprise segment there’s a 50% whitespace opportunity  – much of it around vCenter Operations, SRM, View). But in non-Enterprise there’s 80% white space — tough nut to crack but huge market.

Approaching the market in a new way now — segmented into Enterprise, Commercial, and SMB.

Joint Partner Business in the center — around the edges of the circle are Products, Services, Programs, Incentives and Rewards, Training and Enablement, Solutions. Speaking as Varrow, we can do a lot more to take advantage of the Solution Enablement Toolkits – a focus for us…just takes time by capable people not pulled onto other projects.

4,300 people here – 17,400 people registered for different breakout sessions. 215,000 Partners Trained (interesting how this contrasts/compares to the total # of customers). Added (3) specializations last year — Academic, US Federal, and Healthcare. Adding SMB as a 4th today.

$20k worth of Server Virtualization Software turns into a $270k Total Solution sale (hardware, software, services, etc.). $20k for Desktop Virt turns into $220k on average.

Now looking at competencies — Desktop Virt, Infrastructure, etc. Recently launched VBCA and IaaS — Varrow is one of the first 10 VBCA partners. Also launching Management Competency in Q1.

Profiling WWT as a partner around competencies — #1 Growth Partner and #2 Revenue Partner for Desktop Virt..big focus for them and paid off.

To main Enterprise partner tier, now need (2) competencies to maintain status — will have 1 year to get there.

Launching “Specialized Consulting and Integration” partner program — very interested in this as matches where Varrow is already going.

VMware GRID program — 4 step program on marketing – VMware marketing for partners “in a box”. 1) Select a Campaign, 2) Provide your company information, 3) Executive your Campaign 4) Respond to Leads.

Launching MyVMware beta — tool to help manage customer licenses and other items.

Now it’s about the money – going vague here but there’s incentive from VMWare if you find an opportunity (1), if it’s a new account (1), if it’s a new Solution Rewards for BC/VBCA/Desktop (2), later sales in those same areas (1).

All about focus — how you can differentiate your skills, how you can maximize on VMware’s incentives and rewards, and expanding your network in your customer base and VMware resources.

Now Paul Maritz is on stage – more than half to the world’s workload is now virtualized, 1 VM every 6 seconds, 25 Millions VMs on vSphere, 50,000 partners, 59,000 VMware Certified Professionals, 5,700 Partner Certs in 2011, 65,000 Accreditations in 2011, 215,000 People training through Partner University, 2,000 ISV Partners, 3,600 Apps certified on VMware, 7,.600 VMware-read devices.

That was 2011 – now on to 2012. Previously IT was more about automating paper-based processes with narrow, specific information flows — very narrow context. Employee experience was around automating how people worked in 1975 — desktop-centric, document-centric, email-centric. Now going to Wherever, Whenever, in Context. Now a real-time experience with broad information flows intelligently combined, very mobile and social. Also very stream-centric.

Once this becomes central to how your business works, it’s not about saving money….it’s about surviving — you can’t take this stuff away and have your business still function.

Talking about a grocery store customer — their true core problem was that they didn’t touch the customer until they hit the checkout lane….by which time all the purchasing decisions were made. Now trying to engage in multiple ways before the customer enters the store and also while the customer is walking around — geo-location, infrared to track customer traffic flows, etc. Very different world.

Our problem is that we have to transform the experience we offer our customers…and our employees are also demanding a different experience.

“We can’t hand someone out of college a Windows laptop and say ‘here you are my son – go be productive.'”

We can’t just take everything we have, put some management lipstick on it and be done. Will have to make hard choices about what do we modernize/automate and what do we leave behind.

So what is the way forward? A combination of Front-End Transformation

, Application Transformation, and Back-end Infrastructure Transformation. Ultimately this frees up resources to focus back on to Customer Demand.

Our goal is to let customers take Back-End Infrastructure problems and hand those over to us collectively. Started out with just Virtualization, but now partly moved to and continuing to move into Cloud Infrastructure Suite — App-aware Provisioning and Managemet, Admin Self-Service, REporting, Security, Tenancy on Logical Boundaries, Automated Monitorig and and Management, Resource Pooling and Scheduling.

This needs to be a Suite — can’t do as individual components. Back in the 1990’s there were whole departments devoted to picking the “strategic word processor”. People over time realized there wasn’t competitive advantage in that….it was table stakes. Same thing here….we offer the whole solution and not just individual pieces. People don’t have time to select each individual piece from different vendors.

In 2012 will push new versions in all core areas. In 2013 will bring out Deep Automation pieces. It’s remarkable that 1,000 programmers can put out real updates that are quality.

Newest vCloud Datacenter partner yesterday – AT&T. New European partner tomorrow.

Today’s Apps are being handled by vFabric. Cloud Foundry goes towards Tomorrow’s Apps — about changing how you develop….much more forward-looking around building apps.

So what is the need and also the opportunity? It’s so much more than just the technology — need soft skills around engaging the business.

So have talked about Execution (partner focused), Enablement – that was Paul, and now Innovation – Steve Herrod.

Steve Herrod now on stage – walking through what it’s like when you hire a millennial – call her “Fiona”. Working with IT historically one-stop shopping — just go to IT. Now there’s all the *aaS options that Fiona likes to go live.

Challenge to IT — you’re getting circumvented but still responsible to support the business. Means that CIO needs to go from being builder of a captive store to being a broker of multiple services. PaaS, SaaS, etc. are all components under ITaaS.

Rate cards from public cloud providers are challenging — “CFO sees 12 cents/hour to run an app..how much does it cost us?” Do we know? Is it higher? Why if so?

Lord Kelvin — “If we can’t measure it, we can’t improve it.”

Showing a screenshot of an IT Business Management Suite – is this released yet? I don’t think so but asking on Twitter.

3 Areas to cover today – 1)

1. Post-PC Era
   • This is a lot of VMware View….but focusing heavily on Project Horizon so it’s more just about applications and data.
   • A real tactical opportunity is migrating to Windows 7 and/or Windows 8.
   • Horizon App Manager is already rolled out within VMware….apps show on the screen are ADP, AmericanAirlines, Basecampk Box, Campfire, Cerner, Dropbox, IE Gogle Apps, LinkedIn, Mozy, NetSuite, SlideRock, SalesForce, NetDocuments.
   • So what about the data? “How many are using Dropbox?” Almost everyone raises their hand. “How many are allowed to use Dropbox?” Most hands go down.
   • It’s…..Project Octopus. Shows a screenshot b/c he’s using it but it’s still in beta….no release date yet….bummer.
2. One platform – vSphere
   • It’s still about vSphere — even Hadoop on top of that.
   • Mitel announcing running VOIP stuff on vSpehre — real-time, low-latency application. 3 years ago people thought this couldn’t be done….but now vSphere is the standard way to do this.
   • Smart whiteboards controlled by View.
   • Diebold ATM – running View – very secure and highly available.
3. Cloud Management
   • Actually it’s more about trying to avoid management – how to interact with the cloud and our users.
   • Cost – management is how we move from mainly CapEx to really getting OpEx.
   • 3 Core tenants
     • Self-Service…without Chaos — it’s not about the HTML code when you go to dell.com, same here…we want a nice veneer on top but it’s the backend processes that are what’s really critical.
       • Now showing “Service Delivery Manager” – new unreleased product.
       • Covers Horizon stuff…..but also shows stuff currently more in vCloud Director.
       • This feels like vCloud Director but also with more application integration…screenshot with a bunch of disparate items.
       • iOS vCloud Director client available today – cue some great customer demos.
     • Managing Scale – as we grow, have to do things differently.
       • VM Installed base is rapidly growing. VM count starting to rapidly decouple from hardware server count.
       • 80 million VM’s by 2014 according to IDC. We can’t manage this the same way as we used to.
       • Herrod – “vCenter Operations solves a problem we created.” Very true…what I said to a customer last week. #VMwarePEX
       • About automated trending, knowing what’s normal, clear presentation of dense data (heat maps, dashboards, etc.)
       • Varrow is all over vCenter Operations right now — multiple customers already have purchase it and talking about it a lot.
     • Automate! – everything in sight.
       • Scary how many people still maintain spreadsheets to track where VMs get placed — ESX hosts, storage, network, etc.
       • Two new fronts here — making sure to satisfy security and compliance requirements (we already have a lot of stuff around compute, storage, network).
       • Self-healing – b/c we’re virtualizing, we can self-heal much more than in years/decades past

One more thing — IT and the CIO are being pushed into more standards…..3 nonnegotiable traits.

1. Reliability – customer sent in picture of 3 years of uptime, another customer showing 6 years of uptime. This reminds me of a statement about a Novell Netware server — it’s cool but why does this truly matter with DRS/HA/vMotion?
2. Nimbleness – on a true yearly cadence…and committed to continuing to do that.
3. Open and Interoperable (working with other partners) — it’s easy to be open, easy to be integratable….hard to do both.
   1. It’s the depth of integration – showing new vCenter web client — saw some of this last night at a private preview. Saying deeper third-party vendor integration in vCenter web client (even into the search for instance).

@herrod says “If you do cloud, your CIO will dress like a bald Elvis.” (not quite but my paraphrase) #VMwarePEX