VMworld 2020 kicked off with a series of announcements involving a wide range of enterprise interests, from security, multicloud, hybrid cloud and modernizing applications to artificial intelligence, machine learning and networking.

The day’s news also brought into focus the many partnerships that VMware Inc. has formed to bring new technologies to market.

“This is one of those must-see shows for a huge ecosystem,” said Stu Miniman, co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. “One of the things we look at is who’s driving innovation and change. The epic partnership between VMware and AWS really has dominated the discussion the last few years in this ecosystem, and they’re expanding not only with Microsoft Azure, but with Oracle.”

Miniman spoke with John Furrier and Dave Vellante, co-hosts of theCUBE, during theCUBE’s Day One analysis as part of its VMworld event coverage. They discussed various partnership announcements and VMware’s innovation strategy in an unpredictable world.

Joint announcement with Nvidia

At VMworld last year, VMware and Nvidia Corp. announced an acceleration of machine learning and AI workloads for VMware Cloud on AWS. Nvidia, which recently made news through its acquisition of Arm Holdings Ltd., extended that partnership with VMware this week with the announcement of Project Monterey for AI workloads.

“VMware has such a huge installed base, everyone wants to do business with them. And everybody wants to do business with Nvidia,” Vellante said. “As usual, VMware had a bunch of announcements at its big show. They have done a phenomenal job of translating engineering into new opportunities and delivering customer value around that.”

VMware’s announcements came at a time when a global pandemic has injected a note of uncertainty into future business strategies for many companies and forced major events, such as VMworld, to be delivered in an all-virtual format.

“This is the show theme: ‘A digital foundation for an unpredictable world,’” Furrier noted. “The innovation strategy of VMware has to be on full display in this unpredictable world. Multicloud, AI, it’s crazy right now.”

Watch the complete analysis video below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld.

Image: VMware Inc.