Well this post is actually being written back in Bantry Bay,  having made it through the gauntlet of 3 flights, back to back,  from San Francisco to Cork. I got here before my suitcase too by a day, which was irksome but otherwise fine.

Anyway, day 3 was a winding down of Oracle Open World as in the last day of the show floor booth demos.  Not that we noticed any let up in the crowds coming by the EMC booth 🙂

In any event the EMC Elect members took upon a challenge to attend an Oracle demo on Cloud Infrastructure. Matt Brender, Rob Markovic and I listened to the Oracle Engineer talk about the offering from Oracle. We confessed that there was not a DBA between us and that our skew was somewhat storage specific. But in fairness to the Engineer he did share the storage management benefits. Following that demo, we three sat down and decided to discuss the demo we attended over twitter. The idea was to do fun sharing but also to discuss what we learned and seek others opinions and Subject Matter expertise.  It worked and @cacheflush chimed in with some context. this was a seminal conversation as you will see below.

It shows that the EMC Elect members can share what they have learned and draw others into a community conversation in a live environment. We’ll try and utilize this a lot more and improve it of course. But it certainly was educational and fun.

Then At 2:30 pm a Sea of EMC Fans gathered for a grand prize draw outside the booth. Yes, EMC scarf wearing Fans 🙂

That was a great event and a good culminating one for the week. Those scarfs also came in handy for Oracle Open World Customer appreciation party. That was a pretty good event with some great headline acts. It’s a pity Larry Ellison did not make it to it, but he must have been exhausted after winning the Americas Cup:) Congratulations to the US team.

Later a few of us adjourned to Tornados, a “quiet” watering hole in San Francisco . We reminisced, and reflected on our Oracle Open World experience. And openly engaged in  some banter. All in all for a first foray into Oracle Open World, I think we had a highly successful show. Indeed we brought a lot of attention to EMC Elect, we even saw increases in nominations for the 2014 EMC Elect. A clear sign that the word is getting out and that people want their peers recognized.

I am glad I attended, I am delighted with the experience I had and what I could do to bring more attention on the EMC Elect. I am rather pleased Matt and I did this video:

And I would encourage those following this series of posts to consider nominating people for the EMC Elect of 2014.

Nominate here: http://emc.im/YWyPI6

Thanks for following this series of posts. I appreciate all readers taking the time to follow this and please, feel free to comment. Add your views on how you think this event went for us. And share what you’d like to see at future events.  I’d love to hear from you.

Until next time……..

Wow so Day 2 started in the early am. I actually had a semi sleepless night. It’s just hard for me to rest easy in a hotel room.

Anyhow we had the key note  at 8:30 am and it was brilliant. Especially migrating humans via VPLEX 🙂

As Fun as it was to do a trick with twins it really was a perfect demonstration of what you can actually do with your Data Center with VPLEX.

They Key note was a cool  highlight of the day, but the EMC Elect continued to interact. In fact we decided to do some missions of fun to show the lighter side of community.

We took on a mission, @mjbrender @vrobm and  I, for an impromptu meet up at the Sweet Shop. We wanted to show how EMC Elect collaborate to build vital new things, like cup cakes 🙂

I think we agreed that operation cup cake was a success, for those of us with a sweet tooth. They were indeed delicious.

Later we caught up with @virtualchappy, a fellow EMC Elect member and it was good to get a #chappyhug and catch up. And then for more fun we scarfed him and others. Operation scarfed was another fun mission as can be seen by the tweets we pushed out. Again, just some social community fun etc.

Finally we decided to relax and enjoy a Pint at the Netapp bar 🙂

All in all a good fun social thing for the Elect. With emphasis on the community spirit and a bit of required levity. This show is massive and the EMC booth is beautiful and busy, constantly.

All in all day 2 was great, for EMC, some fun for the EMC Elect and a little controversy for Oracle’s Larry Ellison, who missed his keynote. Something to do with the America’s cup allegedly. But hey the Oracle American team is making one hell of a comeback against New Zealand  so who could blame him 🙂

Anyway day 2 finished off with the EMC, Cisco and Intel customer appreciation event. I’m sure Sean aka @sthulin got plenty of photos which he will share.

So day 3 is coming up. More to come

7 Reasons to Join the EMC Community Network – Infographic

This Info-graphic tells a compelling story of community engagement benefits  that really emphasizes what I have been passionate about and blogging for. It really is a great success story for EMC’s community and social engagement.  Our support Community in EMC, since I joined it 7 years ago as a community Manager, has been on an immense and engaging journey. Its made excellent and possible by the massive community membership engagement that happens every day.

It seems like a life time since our humble beginnings on the EMC PowerLink platform. But how it has grown! From a closed limited member participation to the busiest community on the ECN with a membership well over 250,000 +, the EMC Support Community has thrived. It supports a massive portfolio of products and services and is a premier global support platform with Multilingual offerings to native Chinese, Japanese and Spanish speakers.  And the supported languages will keep growing.

But despite all its rapid and expanding development as a platform customers and partners depend on, the fundamentals of the Support community still apply. It’s about the people, the community of peers and the trust that is within that community. That’s what drew me in and keeps me going. Its a fantastic community. Thanks to @stephmcbride for making this info-graphic happen.

Feel free to comment and share your stories on my blog or better yet on the Support Community. We’d love to hear from you. 

” This is the right time, and this is the right thing.” – Thomas Moore

Well, it’s been a while and yes it’s the usual excuse, I have been busy. But I really have.
Remember this post of mine? Well it is finally becoming a reality and I am delighted! We will finally be able to recognise and thank our loyal community members who advocate on behalf of their community.
Matt Brender and I are the unlikely duo who will spearhead this Project. Matt describes our Project very well on his own blog post about what is codenamed Project DNA

Recognising and celebrating our Advocates at EMC will be amazing!

The enthusiasm and Passion both Matt and I have for this Project are summed up in this quote from his post ” We’re ready to go big, and there’s no way we’re going home unsuccessful.”
I love it ! Recognition for our advocates is finally getting the big roll out it deserves.

It’s just fantastic!

EMC Ask the Expert

And tied to that is the other behemoth of a Project that I’m heading at present, EMC’s Ask The Expert. It’s going great guns and it’s thanks to those advocates we plan to thank through Project DNA, who are making this project a great success. We’ve even launched our own twitter account for it @EMCAskTheExpert and tomorrow we kick off our first experimental “Tweet Chat”. you can follow it it if you wish using #EMCATE.
it will be about “Performance calculations in Clariion / VNX” which is also a current ongoing discussion on our Ask The Expert Support Forum.

And that of course is not all, we will continue to expand Ask The Expert to product updates and launches, facilitating access to Customer advocates and subject matter experts who can make sense of a new feature or launch and what it means to EMC community members and product users.  And we will continue to bring in experts to address hot topics relevant to our Support Community members.

For more information on how Ask The Expert works you can listen to .. well .. me 🙂 talk about it when I was recently interviewed about it by the InFocus team

I am increasingly busy, but I have to say I am enjoying every minute of it. It’s incredible how much the Support Community in EMC has grown. It offers so much to the existing and newer community membership and it’s provided by dedicated community members sharing their experience, knowledge and expertise. I love being the Community Manager for it, as I get to know these community members, listen to them and advocate for them. The passion of our advocates is amazing. And I am delighted and honoured to play my part in having EMC recognise them through Project DNA. Much more about that very soon, that’s a promise. 🙂