VMworld 2013 San Francisco has come and gone but not without leaving some exciting product launches and program updates behind. The announcement of the VMware vCloud Suite 5.5 brought the software-defined data center to life, while fundamentally redefining the role of the hypervisor in the data center. Partners can learn more about going to market and selling the new vSphere with the Operations Management by accessing the Product Launch Playbooks on Partner Central: vSOM Playbook, vCloud Playbook, cVHA Playbook.

The software-defined data center vision builds upon our heritage in compute virtualization by using the same principles of abstraction, pooling and automation to bring flexibility, automation and efficiency to storage and networking. This year, we’re delivering on the vision we laid out for the software-defined data center. This new offering was designed to help IT accelerate its adoption of a software-defined data center architecture and take advantage of the value of advanced virtualization in areas such as networking and security, storage and availability, and management and automation.
 
Additionally, VMware announced it is building a value channel that is based on the principles of consistency, predictability and profitability, for which the underlying theme will be simplicity. Stay tuned—we will share more information about the value channel at our February 2014 Partner Exchange in San Francisco.
 
To all 23,000 of you who made it to this year’s VMworld 2013, we hope you continue to defy convention with us. For those of you who missed us in San Francisco, you can catch the highlights or join us Oct. 14–17 for VMworld EMEA in Barcelona.
 
Until next year,
Sandra Haan

Sandra Haan Norris is a director at VMware. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of The VAR Guy’s annual platinum sponsorship. Read all of VMware’s guest blogs here.