More than 21,000 participants attended VMworld 2019, where top VMware and industry experts spoke about what’s coming next in IT.

Read more analysis about the event in this PDF download.

From the PDF

VMware in the span of seven days set its strategy to grab more multicloud deployments, positioned itself in case developers favor containers over virtual machines in the future and reiterated its case as a go-to enterprise engine for digital transformation.

CEO Pat Gelsinger summed up the strategy on the company’s second quarter earnings conference call, which was dominated by the acquisitions of Pivotal and Carbon black, and then reiterated it at VMworld just a few days later.

Now VMware can clearly say we’re uniquely positioned as the multicloud, hybrid cloud of choice. And customers are beginning to understand that. This idea of being able to tell customers that we enable you to take advantage of these enormous, rapidly evolving, globally available public cloud resources is a very powerful thing.

Yes, VMware has a partnership with Amazon Web Services as a preferred hybrid cloud choice. But Gelsinger also noted that VMware’s integration with Microsoft Azure garnered customer interest quickly. The Azure-VMware tandem is designed to be a software defined data center using VMware Cloud Foundation and sold and supported by Microsoft Azure. Within two months, 20 customers including Gap have been onboarded.