Hard to believe but the first day of autumn is just two days away and with fall weather always comes cooler temperatures (which I happen to enjoy!) This means people are staying inside a little more and doing those fun, end of year activities that everyone enjoys – such as planning their 2019 budgets. As you do so, solutions from BackupAssist and StorMagic are two key new technologies for companies to consider making room for in the New Year.

At early VMworld shows, stories emerged of attendees scurrying from booth to booth on the exhibit floor looking for VM data protection and hardware solutions to address the early challenges that VMware ESXi presented. Fast forward to the 2018 VMworld show and the motivation behind attendees attending training sessions and visiting vendor booths has changed significantly. Now they want solutions that bring together their private and public clouds, offer better ways to analyze and automate their virtualized environments, and deliver demonstrable cost savings and/or revenue opportunities after deploying them.

VMworld provides insight into some of the biggest tech trends occurring in the enterprise data center space and, once again, this year did not disappoint. But amid the literally dozens of vendors showing off their wares on the show floor, here are the four stories or products that caught my attention and earned my “VMworld 2018 Best of Show” recognition at this year’s event.