Article for SiliconANGLE by Jason Bloomberg
Historically, VMware Inc.‘s VMworld conference was one of the big three enterprise tech conferences, along with the RSA Conference and AWS re:Invent, that was large enough to transcend its primary sponsor, thus becoming one of the must-attend conferences of the year.
In contrast, this week VMware hosted the newly renamed VMware Explore conference – about one-third the size of the last pre-pandemic VMworld show. About 100 vendors exhibited, with most having a partnership or other salient tie to the host vendor. (* Disclosure below.)
Nobody, it seemed, had a good answer as to why the company would change the name of its flagship conference. And sloughing off the brand equity of the VMworld name wasn’t even the only head-scratcher from VMware at the conference.
VMware cedes its cloud-native leadership position
Perhaps the most noticeable change in VMware’s marketing strategy was how the company downplayed its cloud-native story in favor of a multicloud strategy.
Cloud-native certainly remains important to VMware. Its Tanzu suite of products helps developers, DevSecOps and ops personnel run and manage Kubernetes clusters across public and private clouds – and is thus unquestionably cloud-native.
Instead of Tanzu taking point in VMware’s innovation strategy, however, multicloud moved into the company’s strategic vanguard, pushing cloud-native to the rear.
This shift in perspective will likely herald a missed opportunity for VMware. Instead of making virtualization part of its cloud-native story, it hopes to make cloud-native part of its traditional virtualization-centric way of seeing the world – thus limiting its mindshare among its target audience.
The result is that VMware is ceding its leadership in cloud-native to other vendors, instead placing its chips on multicloud – a concept that the VMware audience understands broadly but remains unclear on the specifics.
