Digital Workspace

VMworld 2021: What to Expect at This Year’s Event

IT leaders will learn how to adapt to turbulent times with modern applications delivered on multiple clouds and in hybrid environments.

Bob Keaveney

Bob is the managing editor of BizTech magazine.

The world has reached an inflection point: The arrival of vaccines seemed to promise an end to the global pandemic that has caused economic disruption around the world. Still, that end has not yet arrived as the Delta variant surges and many people continue to resist getting inoculated.

Most businesses were hoping to be back normal operations by Oct. 5, when VMware kicks off its second consecutive virtual VMworld. As it happens, however, few organizations have been able to implement their return-to-office plans, with many delaying them indefinitely.

All of this underscores the need for business resilience and adaptability. A jammed schedule of events at VMworld 2021 promises to deliver guidance to tech leaders on how they can help their organizations achieve those vital qualities. From October 5-7, thousands of attendees will have access to keynote speakers, breakout sessions and workshops geared toward arming IT professionals for the new normal, all around four themes:

Delivering and securing modern applications
Managing clouds in any environment
Seamlessly supporting an “anywhere workspace”
Accelerating business innovation in a multicloud world

VMworld 2021 Will Exploring Evolving IT Infrastructures

Rangarajan Raghuram, who became CEO of VMware in June following Patrick Gelsinger’s departure to Intel, will deliver his first VMworld keynote address. VMware says Raghuram “will explore how leading organizations are challenging the status quo to move fast, gain competitive advantage and stay secure” by deploying the multicloud technology, digital workspaces and modernized applications VMware is known for.

As for application modernization, VMworld will include a session led by James Watters, CTO of VMware’s Modern Applications Business Unit, who will discuss the future of applications and how organizations can “develop an agile environment, speed up application lifecycles and make those lifecycles easier for users, developers and practitioners without sacrificing performance or security,” the company says.

VMware argues that to succeed, businesses must deliver their applications — whether they are customer-, employee- or partner-facing — across “any combination of data centers, public cloud, and to the edge without compromising on reliability, security or performance.” VMware CTO Kit Colbert will discuss how the company supports that objective with solutions like vSphere, its server virtualization product, which helps organizations scale their infrastructure efficiently.

For organizations that prefer to host at least some of their applications with on-premises technology, VMware will tout its hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, which it says “underpin the hybrid cloud.”

VMware Offers Support for Businesses’ Hybrid Workplaces

Businesses’ return-to-office plans are in disarray, but one thing is clear: The remote work trend will endure, regardless of when enterprises resume onsite work for large numbers of employees. Most businesses expect to deploy hybrid workplaces that will include simultaneous onsite and remote work. VMware officials will discuss the company’s Anywhere Workspace line of solutions, introduced in April, which support hybrid environments. Anywhere Workspace brings together several existing VMware solutions under a single banner: Workspace ONE, which provides unified endpoint management, desktop and application virtualization, plus a variety of employee experience and productivity solutions; Carbon Black Cloud endpoint security; and secure access service edge, which secures software-defined WANs.

To discuss Anywhere Workspace, VMware Senior Vice President and General Manager of End-User Computing Shankar Iyer will be joined by a customer: Hemant Kumar, a business analyst with professional services firm Genpact.

Finally, VMworld 2021 will feature celebrity speakers from the worlds of business and entertainment. Corporate luminaries include Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft; Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud; and Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM. From Hollywood come actor and activist Michael J. Fox and actor and musician Will Smith.

Follow all of our coverage during the conference here, or follow our coverage on Twitter at @BizTechMagazine.

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