It’s that time of year again! vExpert 2020 time! I know I was patiently waiting to see if I was fortunate enough to make the cut this year. By that I mean spam checking email, Twitter and the vExpert blog. Thankfully, late Monday afternoon the email popped into my inbox and I’ve been accepted into the program for another year! I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again. I’m thankful to be considered and honored to be accepted into this crowd of bloggers, influencers and highly skilled individuals.
This is my 4th consecutive year in the program and I only hope I can contribute as much to it and the #vCommunity as I get in return. It’s been a highly rewarding adventure. I’ve been to the last five VMworld conference in both San Francisco and Las Vegas and met a ton of cool and amazing people from the community. I’ve been able to build my skillset and really apply it to my job by melding together some of the coolest technology available today. It’s opened so many doors I can’t even explain how it’s helped in my career.
Not to mention the perks! From the free VMware licensing for almost all of their products to the many manufacturer NFRs, freebies and other benefits including private events, NDA product demos, and much more. All for just contributing to the community and sharing my knowledge about VMware and VMware partners products and services. I can’t recommend enough that if you contribute to the #vCommunity you should apply for the program when it comes back around in June. You can even ask a vExpertPRO to help you determine the best path to get into the program. Check it out at https://vexpert.vmware.com/.
I wanted to address something I’ve seen on Twitter and elsewhere that really bothered me. There are several people, even a few that are part of the program talking down on the vExpert program it like it doesn’t matter or that it’s overwhelmed with people that don’t contribute just trying to get free licensing. I’m sure there are a few that get in and don’t hold up their end. That’s a given with anything but I believe the large majority of participants really do make a difference. Maybe they don’t all blog or blow up social media channels with content.
There are other avenues to becoming a vExpert. I don’t get to post on here as often as I’d like but I do post. That’s certainly not all I do to contribute to the community and to the program. I know I talk about VMware products constantly in my role and I sell storage. I talk about VMware products at events and how they interact with the products I sell. I talk about things like the upcoming vSphere 6 End of Support or I talk at events about how to do upgrades as it relates to the products I sell. I’ve done articles on VMworld and many VMware products. I have a vSphere 7 article coming up in a few weeks. In context though, I am far from alone. Just because you don’t see them constantly blowing up socials people do contribute and so do many others in the #vCommunity.
Anyway, I’ll get off my soap box. Like I said I’m happy to be considered and I look forward to being a part of the community again this year. Look out soon for my vSphere 7 article and I’m doing some testing with nested VMware Cloud Foundation in my lab that I’m probably going to write an article on soon as well. Stay tuned and thanks for reading!
