In the week of VMworld, Monday is traditionally Partner day and Partner day always starts with the Partner keynote.

This years keynote was presented by Andy Hunt, VMware’s VP Channel, Alliances and SMB. 1800 partners registered for VMworld Partner day and tomorrow another 7000 visitors are expected which is 15% more than last year.

After a brief introduction on stage Carl Eschenbach, co-president VMware Customer Operations. Carl thanks all the partners for making VMware successful. Despite hard economic times VMware and Partners showed a strong growth in revenue (37%) and 85% of all revenue is done through partners.

Today VMware will publish the Q3 results after markets close in the US, and it looks to be very promising.

Next topic is the ecosystem for cloud computing. Moving from mainframe, to PC/Client-Server, Web to Cloud. These platonic shifts only happen every 10 to 20 years. The cloud is such a platonic shift and will drastically shift the way we deliver IT services. According to Gartner ‘Virtualization is a modernization catalyst and unlocks cloud computing‘.

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Today VMware announced a new team member for the EMEA region for the fastest growing market world wide, his name is Maurizio Carli. Carli has more than twenty years of experience in the technology industry, including five years at Business Objects where he was Senior VP and General Manager for EMEA. Prior, Carli was with IBM where he rose to VP of the EMEA Software Group. He was snatched from the position of EMEA Managing Director for Google Enterprise were he worked before joining VMware. He choose to come over to VMware because he believes its the place to be for the next coming years with virtualization growing rapidly and shifting the way the IT operates completely.

We @ VMGuru.nl welcome Carli and wish him luck in his new position.

We just enjoyed the General Session for Partner day 2009 and the message is ‘the virtualization business is still growing’, ‘2009 is all about client virtualization’ and ‘get up, register opportunities, close deal, dig deap’.

The keynote was presented to us by Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware. He stated that we can achieve change by two means, evolution and revolution and that evolution is the best as it tends to stay longer. VMware is the platform to achieve this evolution. He revealed a few public secrets, VMware vSphere, vShield zones and VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat. VMware vSphere is the new name for ESX but we knew, and blogged on that, already. VMware vShield zones a security initiative based on VMware Safe.  VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat is VMware’s new feature to create a high available vCenter Server, mostly for implementations where vCenter is still on a physical server.

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