Next week, I’ll be in Las Vegas for VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) 2013.  This is a conference where VMware focuses on their partners.  It’ll be a great chance for me to hear VMware’s plans for the next year first-hand, and meet with a lot of VMware’s and my partners.

This will be my third Partner Exchange, but my first as an actual attendee.  In 2011 and 2012, I was working at the conference.  In 2011, I presented in the EMC Partner boot camp session and then worked in the EMC booth in the Solutions Exchange giving demos on the then-new EMC VNXe.  In 2012, I was responsible for running EMC’s booth in the Solutions Exchange.

This year, however, I’m going to actually get to attend sessions and trainings, as well as have sit-down meetings with several of our partners.  Plus, I’ll get to see a lot of the folks I interact with online, but in-person.

Things I’m Looking Forward To

While there are a lot of things happening at PEX, here are a few of the things I’m looking forward to the most:

• The EMC Partner Boot Camp on Monday.  This will be a great chance for me to get roadmap info and other good information to bring back to my colleagues.
• The VCDX / vExpert Reception on Tuesday.  It’ll be great to see the other folks in this community.
• The Solutions Exchange.  This is where the sponsoring partners bring their latest and best products and solutions to show them off.  I’m definitely interested in seeing what new things will be on display there this year.
• Meetings with Accunet Solutions‘ partners.  This will be a great opportunity to map joint strategies together.  Among the meetings I have set up are:
  • VMware
  • EMC
  • Cisco
  • Brocade
  • Ingram Micro
  • Gigamon
• My debut on Engineers Unplugged on the Cisco Datacenter blog.  Amy Lewis (@CommsNinja) has invited Gabriel Chapman (@Bacon_Is_King) and I to record an episode on the evolution of virtualization.  Gabriel, me, and a whiteboard — how awesome is that?

Keep Up with Me at PEX

If you’ll be at PEX and want to meet, reach out to me and let’s set something up.

If you won’t be there, and want to keep up with me in more or less real-time, I’ll be doing my usual conference live-tweeting, so keep an eye on my Twitter feed.  The official hashtag for the event is #VMwarePEX, so it’ll be easy to keep up with the conference from afar.

For (slightly) more coherent info, keep an eye out here.  I’ll be posting reports from PEX as I get the chance.

Hope to see you there!