Stu’s VMworld 2011 roundup

When I joined Wikibon, I expected that activity on my personal blog would drop; I hoped to put up about 1 post a month. While I did OK for the first 12 months (15 posts), it’s been 4 months since my last entry. The main reason that I haven’t posted here is that my day job includes lots of content creation (in my first year, I wrote 59 blog posts and was primary author on 27 wiki articles). In addition to writing for Wikibon, I’ve always been an active member in technology and social media conversations online and in person. While there are lots of good conferences to attend throughout the year (some with amazing entertainment), VMworld was once again my favorite tech show due to the very active ecosystem of partners and enthusiastic virtualization community.

Here’s a collection of my activity from VMworld [photo on the right is of my badge, I'm an analyst, a blogger and vExpert - thanks VMware!]:

• VMworld Live video with Wikibon and SiliconAngle – full list of over 80 videos here; I moderated panels and gave my analysis on a variety of topics including VDI, cloud, networking and storage integration
• Intel Chip Chat: A podcast with Intel discussing Cloud Computing
• Video with Tech Target (SearchServerVirtualization.com) about VMware’s End User Computing initiative and VMworld keynote
• Video discussing a blogging contest hosted by Thomas Jones; I got to be a judge and I think that the participants appreciated the feedback, it’s rare that bloggers get honest critique

VMworld was one of the busiest work weeks that I’ve ever had; getting to discuss topics with other vExperts and speak to lots of C-level executives and customers. I received great feedback at the show on Wikibon’s VMware storage integration research. The conversations at the conference also provided some data points towards some networking research that I am working on.

Next week, I’ll be at two conferences at the Javits Center in NYC:

For the tech crowd, Interop is October 3-7 and I will be debating with Stephen Foskett on iSCSI vs. FC, Thursday Oct 6 at 3:15pm – details here.

For a dose of innovation and business leadership, I’ll be in the Blogger’s Hub for the World Business Forum, hearing from a lineup that includes Malcolm Gladwell, Jack Welch, Seth Godin and Bill Clinton.

Comments, questions and feedback are always welcome. Find me on Twitter and Google+.

Cheers,

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

vAgents of Change, Positive Deviants and Stories That Inspire

So much going on, wanted to put up a quick summary of some recent and upcoming activity:

VMworld

Amazing week in San Francisco, I got to talk with over 100 people that I met in person for the first time that I knew through online discussions. [here's a photo courtesy of Rich Brambley from the blogger section at the conference keynote - Aaron Delp is next to me, Jase McCarty and John Troyer behind]

On Technology:  ”vAgents of Change.  Virtualization is still relatively new to IT, but it has clearly crossed the chasm into a mainstream product line with 190,000 customers.  Leading the charge to deliver virtualization around the globe are 50,000 VMware Certified Professionals.  The culture of the virtualization community goes far beyond understanding a few products, as can be seen by the volunteer group that puts together the VM User Groups (VMUGs) and the passion of the vExperts.  Will these expert ambassadors of virtualization embrace and drive the change to cloud computing?” – see the full post for my take on ITaaS, Ecosystem, Mobility and xSPs.

On Social Media: “The big takeaway of VMworld 2010 for me from a social perspective was people were using the tools more than talking about them.  While most companies have a long way to fully embedding social into their culture and processes, VMware’s VMworld showed that events can have a multi-dimensional social media offering that supports and amplifies the messaging of the event.” – full post here

Lots of video – I was part of the SiliconANGLE live broadcast during the conference.  I did three segments live (Ed Bugnion of Cisco here, Abner Germanow of Juniper Networks here and Bob Zuber of IBM here), plus 2 recorded segments: with EMC on the journey to the private cloud and Cisco blogger round-up of convergence, VMworld awards and more.

Positive Deviants

I announced a new Wikibon award today which was inspired by Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky.  ”Positive deviants are those who behave better than the norm, even when faced with similar limitations or challenges.”  The PosDev award is “to celebrate those who create a positive impact on the IT community through a collaborative process of sharing information and providing critical thinking on the business and technical challenges of the day.”  The idea of the award is to inspire more people to collaborate and share information – read the full post here.

Stories That Inspire

The PosDev award is an idea that I hope to spread (hat tip to TED – “ideas worth spreading”).  Speaking of great ideas, next week (Sept 15-16 in Providence, RI) I will be attending BIF-6, the summit of the Business Innovation Factory.  BIF is a 2 day event with a fantastic line-up of storytellers in an intimate setting.  You can get a taste of the event from the free “story book“, plus they will be streaming the event live and you can follow the #bif6 hashtag on Twitter.  I’ll be looking to share what I hear and see how it can connect with IT trends and communities.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve got a full quarter at the new job.  I’d like to say a heartfelt thank you to everyone that has been so supportive.  I’m very easy to get in touch with, so don’t hesitate to reach out if you have a person or topic that I may be able to help with.

Cheers,

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

Taking the Virtual to Reality

Next month I have the pleasure of attending VMware’s VMworld conference in San Francisco.  Not only is it an important conference for virtualization, but the storage, networking and compute ecosystems are all strongly represented.  I expect to be pulled in many directions between sessions, analyst meetings, and video (it looks like “The Cube” will be coming to VMworld).  Most of my content from the conference will go on the Wikibon site (where you can find all of my “day job” blogs and research).  The theme of the conference is “Virtual Roads. Actual Clouds.” and just as the conference message is about converting messaging to reality, I look forward to taking many of my online interactions to real life discussions.

John Troyer of VMware created a wiki document of Social Media contributors for the conference.  If you are attending, make sure to put in your Twitter and blog information.  I took the people that have signed up and created a TweepML list (and I will update this list as people update the wiki).  If you’re not familiar with the tool, it allows Twitter users to follow everyone on the list with a single click (it will authenticate your account).  I’ve seen some really good TweepML lists for virtualization and cloud, and thought that one for VMworld could be useful. The easy subscription seems more useful than Twitter Lists or Listorious, what do you think?

If you will be at the conference, I hope to meet you there – send me a note on Twitter (I’m @stu).  If you won’t be able to attend in person, check out this TweepML list, check out the Wikibon site and blog for content and feel free to contact me if there are any questions that you would like me to raise at the event.