VMworld 2021 is different again this year a month later than usual, we are now only five days away from kicking off Virtually. The content catalog for the Virtual event has been live for a while now and once again, the big difference compared with in an in person VMworld is that the mad scramble for session reservations is not required! There are 692 “Live” sessions across the thee day event and 589 “On-Demand Sessions” That total combined number is significantly up on last year… and actually more closer to the last in person even in 2019. Once again, 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.

By going back since I first started doing this annual blog you can see the catalog evolve with the times… certain topics have faded away while others have grown and some dominate.

The makeup of the content catalog is a good indicator of VMware’s forward looking direction. This makes for interesting comparisons between previous events and VMware eye the future.

The catalog is formatted very similar to last year, with sessions now being able to be filtered over the days of the event…. still, the best was to organise your catalog is via the Filter Search.

VMworld 2021

Session Breakdown and Analysis

By digging into the sessions by searching on key words alone, the complied list below gives us a good idea as to the session themes being targeted this year. As usual, I have two numbers… the first being this years number of sessions, with the second in brackets being last years number. If there are no bracketed numbers, then i’ve added the search to this years analysis.

So things have shifted a little from previous years. Tanzu has risen to the top and for me, this is the new leading VMware brand… taking over vSphere. That said, the amount of sessions with vSphere and vCenter rose from the previous years catalog. The public clouds all get good representation, but with that it’s clear that VMware are still positioning them selves as a multi-cloud company first… that should not be a surprise and this has been core to their messaging for a number of years now… it’s what they have embraced! VMware Cloud with over 400 hits on the filter is well and truly part of that strategy. Elsewhere, Kubernetes, NSX and Automation continue to be strong keywords with DevOps tying that all together and while I haven’t searched for it before, Security is featured a lot… in fact it triggered the most hits through the filter at over 600!

VMworld is still different to what most of us know the event to be… that’s cause we can’t be there in person to absorb all the goodness that goes with an in person even of this scale… however hopefully, this is the last year i’ll be doing this analysis based on a virtual event. In 2022 I predict that the Tanzu, NSX, Security and Multi-cloud themes will continue to be built upon as VMware continue to move away successfully from their virtualization core.

https://myevents.vmware.com/widget/vmware/vmworld2021/catalog