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Finally Reflecting on VMWorld 2014

VMWorld 2014 in San Francisco was my first VMWorld experience. The following blog is my attempt to describe that experience from my own perspective. I’ll do my best to make sense as much as possible. But if I summarized it in one sentence, then I would say the following. VMWorld was a pleasantly and professionally overwhelming experience.

I have attended many conferences and established many peer to peer personal connections at them. What was a revelation at VMWorld was the ability to understand how deep those connections are. The best summary given of this and phrased better than I ever could is by Hans De Leenher in his blog post entitled “This is Sparta“. I certainly made friends, but also further realized the human element of the social connections I have established.

As well as the connections, I was able to have the VMWorld experience and get a feeling for how this show ran, compared to others I attended. Now this experience was not necessarily better than other conferences I attended, but it was certainly different. I had a lot more conversations with other vendors and other partners than I normally would have.

For the purpose of my professional reasons for being there, it was very successful. For the EMC Ask the Expert Program  we successfully executed a great ” EMC Ask the Expert Tweet Chat “on the new RecoverPoint release. It was a well engaged tweet chat and a prelude to the Ask the Expert discussion on the EMC Support Community.  So too was the EMC Ask the Expert discussion I ran covering the VMWorld event.

For the EMC Elect it was a great interactive event. We held a private briefing for the Elect just ahead of the RecoverPoint announcement. There were also a good number of the EMC Elect who spoke at breakout sessions, running hands on Labs and engaging as Social Champions at various breakout sessions. And as ever throughout the conference, we tweeted, met up, had numerous discussions, and good fun that can all be seen on twitter under #EMCElect and the few photos I include here.

And its worth mentioning too that the #EMCElect had a team in the #v0dgeball championship. This is an annual event that goes towards a great cause that is the Wounded Warrior Charity. We were knocked out in our first game 🙂 but were delighted to take part in such a noble event for a great charity. Well done to EMC Elect member Fred Nix for spear heading this event, year after year. And well done to my partner in crime on the Ask the Expert Program, Roberto Araujo for stepping up as a referee.

In summary, VMWorld US 2014, for me was a very valuable and fulfilling experience. I learned a lot, connected with some fantastic people, took part in a great charity event and had a birthday too 🙂 and in contrast to loosing our first dodge ball game I smashed my planned work goals out of the park !

And one final thank you is reserved for the brilliant EMC’ers, Erica McDonald, Will Quinn & Steve Knight.  who did so so much for the EMC events team and for the Elect team particularly.

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