We’ve been attending a lot of VMware User Group (VMUG) meetings lately, and some interesting trends are becoming apparent among the attendees and what they’re facing in their data centers. Their places on the virtualization adoption spectrum vary widely, but VMUG participants all seem to be in search of technology that can help them manage the virtualization environments they have right now and grow with them into the future.
VMUG presents us with a technically savvy, no-fluff-tolerated audience. These professionals want to see the technology and hear how it can help them solve real problems: deployment and configuration, self-service provisioning, chargeback and IT costing, workflow and orchestration, service catalog, and change management. Everyone attending the VMUGs (and in the market at large) is talking private cloud, but not everyone is implementing it. So, the question we often hear at these events is, “Can the product in that box solve my management challenges right now, and will I need to buy something else later?” There’s only one right answer to that question from attendees’ perspectives.
The VMUG community is doing a great job communicating its core desire for an all-encompassing, cost-effective virtualization management solution. But these meetings are about more than the technology. Some of these groups have created tight-knit connections that personify the word “community.” The same people are turning up at the VMUGs again and again. That builds relationships, and relationships build the kind of trust needed to have honest conversations about what is happening in virtualization adoption and what needs to happen to move more business forward toward the private cloud.
We thank everyone who sat in our presentation sessions and who dropped by the booth for further discussions and we hope to have the chance to speak with more of you in the near future.
