Unless you live under a rock, or virtualization is not your focus in the IT industry (so why are you reading this blog?), in one week it will happen again: VMworld, the main event of our sector, will take place in San Francisco. As usual, it will be a rollercoaster for all attendees: tons of technical sessions to attend, many vendors to meet and talk at their booths, networking with friends old and new.
This will be my fourth VMworld in a row, the third in the US. Year after year I’ve become a better skilled attendee, or at least I think so. I’ve learned how to manage my time to don’t get overflown by activities, and focus on what I really want to get from the time I spend there. There is so many activities to do in the available time, so that scheduling at VMworld as become almost an art. But this post is not another guide to VMworld, you can find many of them and many bloggers are sharing their own experiences to help newcomers to enjoy the conference at best.
No, this post is about a strange and interesting feeling I’m having as the conference is coming: this year it will also be my first one. It’s no secret I joined Veeam this year in February (by the way, it’s six months now, time is flying…), and in my role I will attend both VMworld US and EMEA events. This will be my first experience at VMworld as a vendor employee, and I’m thinking about what to expect.
Some things will be different for sure: I’ll be on “the other side of the desk”, meeting customers and prospects and doing my best to explain them what we do and how we can help them, collect feedbacks, requests, ideas. I usually was one of the guys stopping by to booths asking, now it will be my turn to explain to others. But as usual, I hope, it will be more an exchange opportunity than a teaching lesson. I like to interact with customers, even more if they are really engaging and we can share ideas.
But apart from this, I think most of the things will be the same: I know so many guys in this market, and VMworld will be another opportunity to meet them again, and share some good time. When it comes to people there is no difference between customers, partners, vendor employees, we are all part of this big virtualization community. It will be like a family reunion, without pesky mothers-in-law 🙂
Finally, some informations about my schedule. My main project of interest, Veeam Cloud Connect, it’s in its beta stage and things are advancing really well. Feedbacks are great so far and development is advancing at a great pace. This among other things is one of the reasons I slowed down in blogging, but be assured once it will be generally available, there will be a new wave of posts about it and some related interesting technologies I’m working one!
Our booth will have all the new features of the upcoming Backup & Replication v8 ready to be demoed, so if you want to see C running stop by the booth! I will not be at the booth everytime, but if you want to talk about it, or about other topics related to service providers or storage, drop me a tweet and we will arrange.
Also, I will present a session in the Solutions Exchange Theater. It will be a 30 minutes presentation titled “STP3156 Restores for any occasion: 39 restore scenarios from one Veeam backup”, and I will be joined by my great colleague Rick Vanover. It’s scheduled for Tuesday 26th at 13.20.
See you all there in a week!