VMworld 2012 is just a week away, and now is a good opportunity to reflect on what came out of the gathering – one of the largest annual conferences in IT – last year.

Security was a big deal at VMworld 2011.  Last year a long string of successful attacks on enterprises and government agencies drew a lot of attention to this area, a then somewhat neglected field, and it didn’t go over the heads of the attendees either.

VMware CTO Steve Herrod stopped by theCube, where he predicted a lot of progress to be made around accommodating mobile in the enterprise. He also elaborated on how this converges with virtualization – firewalls disrupt the architecture, he said, which is why VMware is taking the smart approach rather than going with brute force.

One of the security highlights at last year’s conference was the integration of VMware vShield App with security software from Catbird.  Michael Bremin is the CTO of Catbird, who during a Cube interview elaborated on the significance of the alliance: how his company’s API and the agility it delivers managed to realize real benefit. This is something other firms discovered as well: Mashery, a cloud-based API management service, recently raised $10M in funding.

Backup was also a central topic at VMworld 2011. EMC’s Steve Manley also pegged tighter integration as a huge factor, although not when not in the security department but in context to companies needing to back up increasing quantities of data. VMware CIO Mark Egan talked about internal IT too in a separate interview, and provided a glimpse into on his company’s dogfooding.

There were many other major highlights at the event, including Pat Gelsinger’s Cube interview about the future of flash in virtualized environments. Gelsinger, at the time EMC’s COO and now the chief executive officer of VMware, had a very solid vision of how this trend is going to evolve.


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