One of the major changes at VMware Explore in August was the name itself. The event, previously known as VMworld, was rebranded in 2022 to reflect the company’s own transition from being a virtualization pioneer and developing the private cloud to what has become a multicloud universe.

“It wasn’t just to come back to what we were doing before, and every company should be thinking about that, but what we’re going to do to actually go forward,” said Laura Heisman (pictured), chief marketing officer at VMware Inc. “We’re in what I call chapter three, which is our move into multicloud and helping all of our customers with complexity. VMware itself is on its own journey, expanding in more of the cloud, with our multicloud leadership and everything we are doing there.”

Heisman spoke with theCUBE industry analysts John Furrier and Dave Vellante at VMware Explore, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how the rebranded event reflects a continued need for online content and the importance of addressing developer needs. (* Disclosure below.)

Need for on-demand information

This year’s VMware Explore gathering reflected a changed landscape brought about by more than two years of a global pandemic. Although the event in San Francisco attracted more than 10,000 in-person attendees, there was still a sizable audience that preferred the experience online, according to Heisman.

“We’re at a point where not everyone is going to come back, you have to think about it as in-person and online,” she said. “We have a ton of on-demand content. For our viewers online, we want to be sure that they’re able to know what’s going on, stay in touch with everything VMware, and enjoy that.”

A key audience for VMware remains the developer ecosystem. The company made a number of announcements during the show geared to support the developer community, including new Tanzu products to manage Kubernetes and advanced tools to automate provisioning of data assets.

“We’re helping developers be able to test and learn with our products,” Heisman said. “It’s thinking about the enterprise developer and how we can help them be successful. We have such an opportunity to help our developer community understand the benefits of VMware, to make them heroes.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMware Explore:

(* Disclosure: VMware Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither VMware nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE