The alarm clock rung at 3:30am to drive to the airport heading to Berlin for the E2EVC Berlin.  Wonderful weather in Berlin and a wonderful event location. My experiences of the first day of the E2EVC Berlin are written down in this blog.

Traditionally Alex opened the event. For Alex it was a pretty serious opening with good point about the E2EVC Conference. Also the senators, grandfathers and centurions were mentioned.

After the opening the next tradition was there, the first session of the event is by ControlUp and again by Eugene Kalychev. Logically he introduced the product for the new attendees (which were pretty large group this time). Based on some questions Eugene talked about the monitoring options for AWS (and working on other cloud providers). Eugene showed some of the new features like the automation functionality. Also Insights was shown, the reporting and trend analysis part of ControlUp. Now also forecasting is also available in InSights.

Christiaan Brinkhoff and Bas van Kaam released their Community Book Project Byted Sized with quotes about Cloud (and EUC). Via a kahoot quiz they give away the first 10 books. Nice way to introduce the book.

Next Alex made a special announcement, which was/is ………… that we have a dinner at a special place namely the TV Tower (Fernsehturm) sponsored by VMware during the night out of this day.

Next on stage was Shawn Bass with the VMware EU state of the union. He started with customers shared beliefs (digital workspace is a journey, employee engagement is the critical component, need more automation and self-service, security initiatives are top of mind, want the best out of O365 and integrate, have too many solutions and want to eliminate silos). Shawn discussing the focus change of VMware with supporting an expanded ecosystem. Next was about the announcement partnership of Microsoft and VMware.  Next topic was Cloud-Based Policy and Configuration with Workspace ONE. Shawn also discussed the extend MS WVD features with Horizon on Azure. Also the announcements about the Dell Technologies Unified Workspace was mentioned. Shawn continued with describing the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (CVAD) for VMware Cloud, followed by the One Workspace Intelligence including some interesting demoes showing the possibilities, followed by the Trust Network functionality. Mobile Flows (micro part of apps in Workspace Hub/Boxer), will be followed with Intelligent Hub Approvals Service.

After a nice lunch I had some nice conversations so I did not see all sessions. I came back when the Parallels sessions just started. The presentation was an overview of the Parallels RAS solution, similar as the presentations at earlier E2E events. He was also sharing results of survey about the usage of VDI and Cloud Usage. He also mentioned some new features like Google Authenticator, AI Session pre-launch, Web-based console, REST API and Granular Permissions (RBAC).

Next session was Jorrit van Eijk with the session the strategic element in the security architecture. Jorrit started with traditional approach for security, followed by the new approach of security (moving target defense). Jorrit explains how the handle the memory attack surface. It was difficult to get the way the product Moriphsec is actually working. Jorrit showed the product in a demo.

Andrew Wood was next on stage with his presentation – Amazon ASW Putting a Face on Digital Experience. He started again as a comedian, but in someway we came to Amazon Sumerian. Sumerian is a kind of service around virtual designing (some examples are collaborative space planning, AR/VR for Visualization, machine learning. Andrew shared the URLs of the demos he created. Not fully see the added value for this product at this moment. One of demo URLS is https://00201341e1314e18840b050fb02dfe8d.eu-central-1.sumerian.aws/?.

Last session of the day was by Serge Levi introducing his products AppsMon, AppsLoad and AppsTiming (Itexis). He talked quickly through the characteristics of the company and the product. Samuel Legrand was also on stage describing how he used (some of the) products at a customer.  Samuel also touches about licensing, deployment time and built-in failure remediation for scenarios. Serge continued with a demo recording the scenario, loading the scenarios and so on.

After this session it was time for a dinner at the TV tower, which was sponsored by VMware. Although I already visited the TV tower in a previous visit to Berlin it was a wonderful experience having dinner at such a location with that view (we had wonderful weather so the view was amazing). It was a goodnight out. Looking forward what day 2 will bring.