The CDW Solutions team attended VMware EMPOWER Americas, a live technology, sales and marketing training event for partners. Our team attends each year for training, insight into new VMware technologies, networking opportunities and a hands-on lab experience. This year was the first time the event has gone virtual, and it did not disappoint.
During the general session, VMware executives including Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger; SVP and GM, Americas Dom Delfino; VP, Americas Partner Organization Bill Swales; and Global Channel Chief Jenni Flinders, provided an overview of VMware’s strategies and priorities for 2020, key investment areas in their product and services portfolio and partner programs and opportunities. This year, VMware is focusing on helping customers solve their customers’ problems with their infrastructure solutions.
Agile and Flexible IT: Imperatives for Business Continuity and Innovation
During the technical general session Chris Wolf, VP, Advanced Technology Group at VMware discussed new opportunities for partners in the ever-changing global technology landscape, as well as VMware’s technology strategy and how their portfolio meets their customers unique business continuity and innovation needs. He was later joined by Amanda Blevins, Senior Director and Chief Technologist, Office of the CTO, and they both demonstrated new technologies including:
- VMware Workspace ONE: An intelligence-driven digital workspace platform that integrates access control, application management and multi-platform endpoint management to securely deliver and manage any app on any device. Some key benefits are the ability to onboard a new employee quickly and seamlessly and to offer a great consumer experience through complete business processes from a mobile device.
- Managing and securing Kubernetes: As of April, vSphere now offers Kubernetes in its control plane. This is best suited for running traditional workloads and modern, native applications and allows developers to use the Kubernetes API to manage their cloud resources.
- Project Pacific in VMware vSphere 7: Back in 2019, VMware announced Project Pacific at VMworld 2019, which was a preview of how they could integrate vSphere with Kubernetes. This year they announced vSphere 7 which is the result of this advancement.
- New ways to bring cloud services anywhere customers do business: VMware SD-WAN is bringing datacentre and cloud apps to all business locations. They also continue to innovate and deliver virtualization technology that helps their customers build the foundation to efficiently develop and deploy applications and services.
Work at Home Business Continuity
During the sales general session, Muneyb Minhazuddin, Vice President Solutions and Product Marketing, talked about the challenge that organizations are facing to continue operations as employees are making the transition to working remotely. Additionally, changes in customer demand are putting a strain on organizations, with some seeing sharp declines in demand and others seeing major increases. This session showed us how organizations are leveraging VMware business continuity solutions to enable employees to work remotely, maintain productivity and ensure they do so securely.
Hands-on Labs
In addition to the sessions, VMware also hosted a series of hands-on labs. The top 3 technologies that we learned about during these labs are:
- VMware Tanzu Mission Control: Mission control allows organizations to operate and secure their Kubernetes infrastructure and modern apps across teams and clouds by moving faster in development, managing Kubernetes at scale and boosting your security of your Kubernetes clusters.
- VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud: SD-WAN by VeloCloud enables your bandwidth expansion, provides optimal connectivity, supports virtual services and automates branch deployments.
- Integrating Kubernetes with VMware NSX-T Data Centre: Container networking with VMware NSX provides integrated full-stack networking and securing for your containerized applications and microservices.
Key Takeaways from the Conference:
- SD-WAN is an emerging technology that offers many benefits capabilities such as reliable connectivity, simplicity, agility, visibility and enhanced performance. It is becoming a competitive differentiator that all businesses should look at adopting.
- Business continuity is more important now than ever. CDW and VMware offer the solutions and expertise to help you enable your employees to work remotely and maintain productivity while staying secure.
- Work with your team to start deploying security solutions as part of your DevSecOps pipeline and to start delivering cloud-native applications today
If you’re looking to get started on your roadmap toward cloud-native or DevSecOps, our professional and managed services teams are highly qualified and experienced with VMware’s continuously evolving technology. We help our customers optimize the value they receive from their technology investments every day, so if you are looking for more information on how we can help your team, contact your CDW Account Team today or visit cdw.ca/infrastructure.
