brandon_butler
Senior Editor

AWS re:Invent and VMworld: A tale of two conferences

News
Oct 9, 20152 mins

There's a great divide that exists in how customers are solving their IT challenges

In the past few months I’ve had the opportunity to attend two major technology conferences, each on what seem to be opposite sides of the IT spectrum.

At the end of August the venerable virtualization conference VMworld kicked off in San Francisco. Much of the technology discussed was about how to optimize on-premises environments. The company’s software defined data center components, extend into the hybrid cloud and manage mobile devices too. Fundamentally though, it felt like a conference with 20,000 people who are still managing their on-premises environment and are not quite ready yet to go all in on the public cloud.

AWS re:Invent is almost the complete opposite. It’s about 20,000 people who have all bought into the cloud. Startups are all-in on the cloud. Bigger enterprises are using it for real, production apps (like Capital One’s new mobile banking app). It’s no longer just for test and dev or DR.

screen shot 2015 10 09 at 11.26.33 am @awsreinvent

The re:Play party at Amazon Web Service’s re:Invent conference. Another debate is which company throws a better party. 

It was a dramatic difference between the two conferences. So what does this all mean for the market? Different companies are taking very different approaches to solving their IT demands. Some customers are embracing the cloud – and loving it. But there are still a whole lot of companies who aren’t ready to break away from their data centers. My question is: Will they ever be?

brandon_butler

Senior Editor Brandon Butler covers the cloud computing industry for Network World by focusing on the advancements of major players in the industry, tracking end user deployments and keeping tabs on the hottest new startups. He contributes to NetworkWorld.com and is the author of the Cloud Chronicles blog. Before starting at Network World in January 2012, he worked for a daily newspaper in Massachusetts and the Worcester Business Journal, where he was a senior reporter and editor of MetroWest 495 Biz. Email him at bbutler@nww.com and follow him on Twitter @BButlerNWW.

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