This is part 3 of my VMworld 2011 recap posts.
Day 3. I woke up to aching legs, which is to be expected considering I have spent the last two days on my feet for around 14 hours. I had arrange to meet Chris Colotti (@ccolotti) for breakfast at 6.45 am. We were presenting our session “CIM1264 – Private vCloud Architecture Technical Deep Dive” at 8am. We headed off to the employee lounge, some of you may have noticed Chris’ tweet on breakfast for champions. It consisted of a bowl of Special K, Red Bull and a large cup of coffee (for me being the true Brit that I am, the coffee was replaced with Tea). We got to our session room for around 7.30am. The guy organising the Audio was great. He kindly agreed to play a bit more upbeat music, rather than the standard mellow music that had been played in our previous session. It was after all 7.30am.
The number of people, who attended this session, being that it was 8am in the morning, impressed both Chris and myself, as there had been numerous parties the night before. We had received some feedback on the session surveys the day before, so we had decided to modify the session slightly. We cut back on the Business requirements and corporate driving factors to dive in to the technical aspect a lot quicker. Chris has written a post showing the difference in feedback on the surveys over the 3 days. Which can be seen by clicking here. It really does make a difference, allowing us to modify the session to fit the audience perfectly. Again I felt that the session had been a success, and looking at the feedback, I believe it was.
I had some free time for the next couple of hours, so I was able to grab some food in the employee lounge and catch-up on emails and twitter. I always use Tweet Deck on my MacBook and was growing increasingly frustrated by the throttling imposed on the Tweet stream. It was great to see how many people were actually enjoying VMworld, and also tweeting about the session we had just presented.
Walking the corridors, Chris and I met Paul Maritz. It was a brief encounter as he was busy, but he kindly took a few minutes of his time to find out what we were working on, and how we thought things were going. This was a great experience for me personally.
After Lunch, I had been signed up to work on the VMware Public Cloud Booth in the solutions exchange. When I arrived I was surprised, and to be honest quite pleased to find out I had been assigned to the Genius Bar. For someone who was self employed two years ago, to be working the Genius Bar at VMworld was a big personal achievement. I loved working the genius bar, I had some real great discussions with people around what there potential use cases for using vcloud, and how they planned to implement these use cases. At around 4pm, it was time to meet Massimo ReFerre, Wade Holmes, and Chris Colotti for the #cloudtalk session. This was a live tweet meeting at the VMware booth. This was actually kind of cool, although sitting next to 4 of my colleagues tweeting each other was a new level in social media. The #cloudtalk was a great success with lots of people joining in from VMworld, and also passers by in the solutions exchange.
It was getting time for the VMworld party. The party was really cool, Recycled Percussion was really good fun and an excellent warm up band. Then came The Killers. I am a great fan of The Killers, and seeing them live was an awesome experience. They did not disappoint, and played everybody’s favourites. Towards the end Chris and I tried to find a bar to grab a drink, and literally bumped into Steve Herrod (@herrod). He took some time to talk to us, and what a great guy. I am always impressed when C level executives take time to talk to the employees, and genuinely interested in what you have to say. The party was now coming to and end, and the 19000 people in the main hall were ordered to move on to The Pool party. We lingered around for a bit, to try to avoid the mass migration. While lingering, we found Duncan Epping (@duncanyb) and Frank Denneman (@frankdenneman). We all moved on to the pool party. The pool party was pretty good. It was nice to be finally outside, away from the Air Conditioning, and the temperature wasn’t too hot, which was a relief. At the pool party I met some really great people including David Owen (@vMackem), Andrew Sharrock (@andrewsharrock), Megan Mescher (@MMesch) and Rick Vanover (@rickvanover). I always enjoy meeting new people, and this was no exception.
To my surprise the party was over, and it was time to head off to the room to grab some sleep before the final day.
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