CEOs Paul Mauritz, Pat Gelsinger at VMworld, 2012
SAN FRANCISCO- Close to 20,000 attendees filed into the Moscone Center for the VMworld 2012 opening keynote on the morning of August 27th, while another 10,000 people joined the event online. VMware wasted no time in announcing a number of transformations, including the formal introduction of its new CEO, release of vCloud Suite 5.1 and discontinuation of the infamous vRAM licensing scheme—the last of which was followed by an eruption of applause.
VMware CEO Paul Maritz, who will be taking on the role of chief strategist at EMC Corp., started the session off by bidding farewell to the VMware community before introducing his successor—Pat Gelsinger, who will transition from his role as president and chief operating officer of EMC’s Information Infrastructure Products division on Sept. 1st. “We are going to see an equal transition of IT over the next four years to what we've seen over the past four years,” Maritz said. “You're going to find out that if there's one thing about Pat, nobody can accuse him of being laid back—Pat is passionate and intense. So fasten your safety belts for the next four years and enjoy the ride.”
Gelsinger began his opening keynote by setting an “audacious goal”—targeting 90% of workloads for virtualization over the next three to four years. “The companies that ride these waves of change have great success and those that don't end up being washed up on the shore,” he said, referring to company transition from the physical to a virtualized, cloud-based world. VMware sees this change occurring in three broad categories: transformation in the underlying infrastructure, transformation in the management of applications and data, as well as transformation in how results are made available to end users.
