As has been the case for the last two years, my first two days of this VMWorld were spent in the Partner Technical Advisory Board.  This board is made up of the top engineers and architects of the top 1% of all VMware North America partners, but represent almost 50% of all the revenue brought to VMware from its NorthAmerican partners.  Needless to say, it’s a great group to be a part of, and it has been my honor to sit on this board for the fourth time.

The first day (Sunday) was desktop based.  Unfortunately, pretty much all of the information presented was repeat from back in February when PTAB last met atPartner Exchange.  It was kicked off by Vittorio Viarengo, VMware VP of Desktop Product Management.  He explained that the delay in deliveringView 4.5 was purely about the quality of the product, as well as covering some of the new features.  He also stated that there will be a stronger emphasis on assessments prior to the proof of concept for VDI deployments.  The rest of the speakers proceeded to dig deeper into the View 4.5 features and a few conversations about features in future releases, including a look into the EndUser Computing and Project Horizon concepts that are being introduced this year at VMWorld.

Carl Eschenbach, VMware’s EVP of Worldwide Sales, stopped by to greet us, and ended up staying for nearly 45 minutes.  It was a great discussion that helped to define how VMware’s partners need to adjust our business models to incorporate the introduction of the cloud.

The second day (Monday) was cloud based.  The discussions on this day were far better.  We received a lot of futures,and it seemed that the product managers were definitely listening to our input.  The highlight was an “imagine yourself two years in the future” discussion of SRM features that really showed the value of PTAB for both the members and VMware. There was also a live demonstration of vCloud Director by Eddie Dinel (who also did the keynote demonstration).

Definitely a great start to VMWorld.  The only major issue was the fact that VMWorld included sessions and labs on Monday, which resulted in the PTAB members missing an entire day of conference goodness.