VMworld 2020 is different this year… but in this COVID year, we are only five days away from kicking off Virtually. The content catalog for the Virtual event has been live for a while now but one big difference this year is that the mad scramble for session reservations was not required! There are 175 “Live” sessions and 748 “On-Demand Sessions” That total combined number is significantly down on the 1348 sessions listed last year… but that is to be expected given the format.

Regardless of that, as I do every year I like to filter through the content catalog and work out what technologies and trends are getting the airplay at the event. It’s interesting going back since I first started doing this to see the catalog evolve with the times… certain topics have faded away while others have grown and some dominate. This direction of VMware’s strategies makes for interesting comparisons between previous events.

The catalog is formatted very differently to last year, with a lot more filters and overlapping checkboxes.

 

I like the way the filter options let you search for relevant sessions, with the main theme topics listed below.

By digging into the sessions by searching on key words alone, the list below shows you where most of the sessions are being targeted this year. If, in 2015 you where to take a guess at what particular technology was having the most coverage at a VMworld at 2020. What i’ve done this year is have two numbers… the first being this years number of sessions, with the second in brackets being last years number. Obviously given the overall drop in sessions, I expected to see a fall across the board.

Once again there is a heavy containers/Kubernetes theme, strategy wise it’s clear that NSX, VMC and Tanzu are front of mind for VMware and their ecosystem partners. Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud get decent airtime and there is still a good amount of automation sessions. Cloud Director (formally vCloud Director) has another strong showing this year and there are still a lot of sessions on core vSphere, vCenter and ESXi.

I honestly don’t know how this VMworld is going to pan out given the Virtual/Online event… clearly all of us would rather be there in person in San Francisco… but for the moment, this is what we have to put up with. I’m sure the quality of the content is not diminished… and on the positive side, there is no excuse to not attend sessions. Harder to be hung over at home 🙂

https://my.vmworld.com/widget/vmware/vmworld2020/catalog