Everything to do with VMworld this year feels like it’s earlier than in previous years. The call for papers opened in Feburary with session voting happening around the end of March. A couple of weeks ago presenters where notified if their session was accepted…or if it was rejected and the content catalog for the US event went live last week! At the moment there is 736 sessions listed which will grow when the #vBrownBag Tech Talks hosted by the VMTN Community get added.

As I do every year I like to filter through the content catalog and work out what technologies are getting the airplay at the event. What first struck me as being interesting was the track names:

Do you see a common thread? They obviously centre around the “digital transformation” theme that we have been fed at every major conference for the last four to five years. I don’t mind it so much, but I know it’s becoming a bit of an industry joke when we hear the same messaging around transformation, digital workspace and modernization.

Shown above are all the products and topics listed in the content catalog and previously when the public voting took place I did some analysis around the number of sessions relating to the filters shown below.

  • vCD 32
  • vCloud 305
  • vCloud Director 64
  • NSX 426
  • NSX-T 116
  • vSAN 223
  • AWS 51
  • Containers 85
  • Devops 69
  • Automation 223

Using those same filters, below are the numbers from what made the cut and are in the content catalog for 2017.

What’s interesting in looking at the submitted sessions vs what was picked up…to be included in the content catalog for the event if you want a better than even chance of having your session accepted, submit around NSX, NSX-T, vSAN, AWS and Containers. In the case of vSAN and Containers, working with these numbers about 60% of the submitted sessions got approved and in the case of AWS the number of sessions approved was more than what was submitted!

Even though the number of vCD related sessions didn’t make it through the numbers are still well up from the dark days of vCD around the 2013 and 2014 VMworlds. For anyone working on cloud technologies this year promises to be a bumper year for content so if you haven’t registered for VMworld 2017 yet…what are you waiting for!

Register here: