Introduction

Next week I'll be travelling from the UK to VMWORLD Europe 2013 in Barcelona.  Here I will record experiences and thoughts on the event and the content from the perspective of a Enterprise Data Centre Strategist for Dell in the UK.

Hotels are booked and a 7am flight out of Liverpool on Monday morning will take me there on a big orange plane.  Looking forward to catching up on all that is VMware and their partners.  This year I'll be looking to see how VMware intend to keep ahead of the game, deal with competition from Microsoft and OpenStack, and to more deeply understand Software Defined Data Centres and Networks.  And there'll be the usual entertaining time finding the new and different solutions that third parties can bring to market, spotting who are likely to progress well in the future and who's no longer on the show floor.

First question is the slogan for the event: "Defy Convention".  For me that would've worked 5 or 10 years ago, but VMware IS convention now, so we'll see how that one pans out during the conference.

I'll try and post reasonably regularly, but will also be tweeting along the way - follow me @NeilHAtDell to keep up to date.

Here's a first glimpse of the Fira Grand Via getting dressed up for the occasion (courtesy of VMWORLD Twitter account):