VMware opens Sydney showroom for channel, clients

A new VMware Briefing Centre has opened at the vendor's Sydney office to allow demonstrations of its end user device capabilities.

"There's no other facility in the region like this," said VMware ANZ managing director Duncan Bennet at a media briefing this morning. "It will be used to demonstrate real world scenarios to executives and partners."

The vendor is pitching the Pitt Street centre as a way to publicise its mobility and end user capabilities in a tangible way, away from its traditional strength in data centre virtualisation.

Bennet said that the venue has a dual-purpose for the channel – partners may attend as audience members or to demonstrate technology to their own clientele.

"We envisage that partners will bring their customers [to show VMware technology]."

VMware end user computing systems engineer Will Dallender-Jones and senior product marketing manager Aaron Steppat took the media through a series of demonstrations to show what the facility was capable of.

This included a school scenario in which VMware's centralised device management capabilities allowed a teacher to lock students' iPads to capture their attention. Student tablets were then locked onto the education app of the teacher's choice, with locking for examinations also possible.

Bennet highlighted VMware's acquisitions of AirWatch and Desktone to demonstrate its commitment into end user and mobile computing in a world where BYOD was becoming the norm.

"We have already had a group of federal government executives in the other day… to show conceptually what's happening in the world of mobile," he said.