“Tomorrow won’t be about customers. It will be about people. That’s us.” Those introductory words served as the crux of the opening General Session presentation at this year’s VMworld conference, setting the tone for Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, Inc., to take the stage and open the event’s proceedings.

“Together, we face forward. … That’s the essence of VMworld,” said Gelsinger, who provided his own summation of the event’s importance. And as Gelsinger continued on into use-cases and market analysis, that forward-facing emphasis reinforced his opening points.

People, products and processes

One of the more concrete instances of this focus on the future came early in the presentation, with special recognition of 21 “alumni elite,” who had attended every VMworld conference. They and their spouses received lifetime passes to the event as a show of gratitude for their commitment and interest, and Gelsinger moved on from these pleasantries to concentrate on the gritty details of VMware’s business.

One of the discussion points was in the examination of the perceived split in IT over ideas of “new business” vs. “traditioinal business,” a divide which Gelsinger rejected. “In fact, all business is digital business,” he said, and the question that these split-seers should instead be asking is: “What is your strategy in an all-digital world?”

As an example of this fully digital business world, Gelsinger looked at some of the ways in which CVS Pharmacy has engaged with digital opportunities to support its customers and serve their needs with a focus on its app’s enabling of personally customized notifications and services. This, Gelsinger said, was an instance of a practice that should be more widely adopted and understood: “New systems built on their existing processes,” he said.

Covering the world with clouds

The next portion of Gelsinger’s presentation addressed the change in cloud accessibility, beginning by looking back a decade to 2006, when the idea of cloud storage was conceived and publicly shared, and looking at today, when public and private cloud storage have hit almost 30 percent of usage, according to Gelsinger. He shared that the estimated date for that share to improve to about 50 percent will not be until 2030 but that VMware is already planning ahead for that point.

Acknowledging that PCs, tablets and mobile devices have hit a point of being a replacement market rather than penetrating new, unserved markets, Gelsinger anticipated an explosion of interest and growth for IT as IoT develops, echoing the burst from when processors became more affordable.

“As cloud takes root, IT becomes more accessible and more cost-effective,” he said, and as “every function of every industry is embracing cloud … every skill that you’ve developed, every portion of the business wants you.”

Freedom and control

To answer these changing needs and expanding forms of usage, VMware is introducing cross-cloud architecture, with common operating environment enabling usage of apps across any cloud. Approaching this undertaking with IBM as its first partner, Gelsinger highlighted the VMware Cloud Foundation with the tagline: “We make the private cloud easy.”

Robert LeBlanc, SVP of IBM Cloud, joined Gelsinger onstage to provide IBM’s perspective, and he judged the reaction of its clients as one of excitement, saying, “I think we’ve hit a nerve with customers.” Focusing on how the VMware Cloud Foundation provides the cloud services to customers without making them pay to support the underlying infrastructure required as the key to providing it as a service while adding security and compliance, LeBlanc stated, “I really believe what we’ve got here is something compelling.”

Alan Rosa, senior vice president of Technology Delivery and IT Security for Marriott International, joined Gelsinger and LeBlanc for a discussion of this new cloud implementation, as well as its reception by the broad sampling of public users Marriott’s business serves.

“More than anything else, what’s impressed me about the way that our business is growing is the global reach,” Rosa said. “Our guests today are more tech-savvy than they’ve ever been.” He added that IBM, VMware and VMware Cloud Foundation are all being utilized by Marriott’s engineers to expand their digital accessibility and services in response.

Cloud formations

Guido Appenzeller, chief technology strategy officer, NSBU, at VMware, took the stage next to address the possibilities of future cloud technologies. Joined by representatives from Columbia Sportswear and Johnson & Johnson, among others, Appenzeller outlined how “these mega-clouds are a great opportunity, and we should embrace and utilize them.”

Appenzeller acknowledged that “going up to the cloud comes with a whole new set of challenges,” but as cross-cloud services require nothing installed on-premise while allowing examination of different load tiers, access, network traffic, communication between project nodes, and more, he and his guests provided a strong case for these functions serving as a firm draw to companies looking to remain competitive. In addition, General Electric provided a brief promo for its Predix service, which will further address and enhance cross-cloud functionality.

Coming together

Gelsinger returned to the stage to reiterate the goals of “making private cloud easy, making it accessible anywhere” and “truly enabling an any-cloud architecture,” before being joined by Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Technologies, Inc., who offered his perspective on several points. An early one, surely a relief to those worrying about VMware’s future under the Dell-EMC merger, was that “the open ecosystem of VMware is completely critical to its success,” as Dell made clear his intent to leave VMware free to adapt and explore possibilities.

Beyond that, Dell stated, “A big priority for us is making private clouds easy … to be able to offer that service and accelerate the adoption of private clouds is absolutely what we need. … Customers want that easy-to-adopt model.”

Dell continued, “VMware’s always had this incredibly vibrant ecosystem, [and] only an ecosystem of this size and power could pull this off … I think the ecosystem only gets stronger.” In conclusion, he said, “All these technologies we’re talking about are right at the fulcrum of human progress in the world.”

Watch the Day 1 General Session video below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld 2016 US.

Photo by SiliconANGLE