Attendees
This year the number of attendees at the partner day is even more than last year, considering the difficult economical times this shows the importance of an event like this, in total 1500 people have made it to Cannes to attend the partner day.

Paul Maritz

Paul Maritz announced a couple of new things in his keynote at the partner day. Today vSphere was announced publicly for the first time. Also vCenter heartbeat was announced together with vShield Zones, a new security suite which makes use of the vSafe API’s that are shipped with vSphere. With the heartbeat is now possible to make you vCenter server highly available, if one vCenter fails automatically another one takes over.
Vmware focuses on three pillars: VDC-OS, the Cloud and the Client, the VDC-OS  must be seen as Paul Maritz called it a software mainframe which is an aggregation of building blocks. Besides that the VDC-OS/vCenter/vSphere more and more will be considered as an internal cloud. The cloud will be more and more important in the near future. It starts with the internal cloud to deliver services to the internal business and evolves into connecting to an external cloud (off premise cloud) with a compatible platform to enable flexible growth when needed. The third pillar, the client, will be hot in 2009. Tomorrow in the keynote Paul Maritz will announce two new products. So keep posted on that!

Carl Eschenbach
Carl Eschenbach introduced Maurizio Carli, formerly employed by IBM, Business Objects and lastly by Google. Carli is the new General Manager of the EMEA region and holds his position for about 90 days now.
VMware today announced a virtual campus called VMware Partner University, VMware has also put some effort in the partner university to localize it. There are different tracks based on your role (sale/presales/post-sale) but also solution focused training will be offered.