Sean Forkan may have begun his journey as vice president and Canadian country manager at VMware in January, but he’s accomplished a lot in less than a year. The former Veritas Canada country manager jumped in head first and announced a renewed focus on the channel for VMware moving forward, which was well received by the Canadian partner community.
One of the biggest moves of the year was the sale of VMware vCloud to French hyperscale cloud provider OVH, which was finalized in April. And at VMWorld, the company announced that its cloud services would be available on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
As a whole, VMware had a busy year and Forkan was in charge of implementing all its new products, services, and partnerships in Canada. The company teamed up with HP Inc. to launch Workspace ONE, a cloud-based endpoint device management and application delivery solution, at its annual VMWorld in Las Vegas in August. VMware also joined forces with Google Cloud and Pivotal Software Inc. to announce Pivotal Container Service, which will allow enterprises and service providers deliver production-ready Kubernetes (Google’s open-source platform for deploying, scaling and operating application containers. It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery).
VMware also unveiled AppDefense, a machine learning-enabled security solution designed to monitor applications against their intended state, detect anomalies, and if needed, automate a response to any malicious activity. It also released updates to its data centre products, VMware Integrated OpenStack and vRealize Network Insight.