If you’ve been following me for a while, you know that I’ve been working for a great VAR and systems integrator, Accunet Solutions, for the past 4.5 years or so.
Recently, that’s changed.
I’ll be spending Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday this week at the Bio-IT World 2016 Conference and Expo at the Seaport World Trade Center in Boston.
Mostly, I’ll be spending my time on the “Expo” side of things. I’ll be doing booth duty for Accunet Solutions, talking about the solutions we can offer Life Sciences customers.
If you’ll be at the conference, stop by the Accunet booth (#327) and say “Hi!” If you hadn’t planned on attending, but will be in the area, reach out — I can get you an Exhibit Hall pass.
The Exhibit Hall will be open:
Naturally, I’ll have GeekFluent stickers to give to anyone who asks.
On Friday last week, Cisco started sending out email welcoming those people who have been selected to receive the Cisco Champion designation for 2016.
For those of you not familiar with it, Cisco Champion is Cisco’s community recognition program. Its main goal is to encourage and recognize knowledge-sharing efforts. To quote from the welcome email:
Cisco Champions are a group of highly-influential IT technical experts who enjoy sharing their knowledge, expertise, and thoughts across the social web and with Cisco. The Cisco Champion program encompasses a diverse set of areas such as Data Center, Internet of Things, Enterprise Networks, Collaboration, and Security.
I am simultaneously pleased, honored, and humbled to have been named a Cisco Champion for Data Center for the third year in a row. I look forward to meeting and working with the other Cisco Champions, which, this year includes three of my co-workers at Accunet Solutions.
You may remember that I made my Tech Field Day debut last year at Storage Field Day 7. If you followed any of the video stream during, or any of the recordings afterwards, you’ll have some sense of how much fun it was and just how much information we received over the course of the event.
What you may not know is that I was invited to return as a delegate for Storage Field Day 8, but, due to scheduling conflicts, was unable to attend.
What you most likely didn’t know (before you read the title of this post) was that I’ll be returning as a delegate for Storage Field Day 9. The event will be in Silicon Valley 16-18 March.
So far, the publicly-announced vendors who’ll be presenting include:
I’ll post more about this event when it gets closer and more of the presenters are public. For now, I’ll just say that I’m honored and excited to have been invited back.
Today, EMC announced the list of names of those people named to the EMC Elect program for 2015.
Now in its third year, the EMC Elect program seeks to recognize engagement with, commitment to, and leadership in the EMC technical community-at-large. EMC has been very active in reaching out to the Elect community, working to involve them in events, and providing access to product information and technical resources.
I am honored and pleased to have been named to the EMC Elect program for the third year in a row. This year a total of 102 people were named, approximately a 27.5% increase over the total named for 2014. You can see the full list of names here.
My involvement with the EMC Elect 2015 goes a little deeper than that. I was one of twelve members of the EMC Elect 2014 who were asked to be on the panel of judges to help select the EMC Elect 2015. Continue reading
I’ve been a fan of the folks at Gestalt IT for a while now. I follow them on Twitter, I read the stuff they post, and I’ve always followed their Tech Field Day events with great interest.
If you’re not familiar with these events, I’ll give a brief idea here: these events bring together a group of presenters from various innovation IT product vendors and give them an audience of delegates to present to and receive frank feedback from — in the spirit of furthering open discussion. These delegates are chosen from independent bloggers and thought leaders in the particular Field Day’s topic area (Storage, Network, Virtualization, etc.).
The idea is to create a better forum for open knowledge-sharing in the technical community. Continue reading
Today, VMware announced the list of 2015 vExperts. The “vExpert” designation is not a technical certification, but instead a recognition of community engagement and personal influence within the various VMware and virtualization communities.
I am simultaneously happy, honored, proud, and humbled to have been included among the 1,056 vExperts named for 2015. This marks the fourth year in a row for me.
One of the things I like about the program is that recipients get the title for one year, and one year only. It’s awarded based on things the recipient did during the previous calendar year. If you decide to rest on your laurels or go inactive, you won’t get the title again next year.
My favorite thing about the program is the people involved. All of the vExperts I’ve met — many of whom work in direct competition with each other — are all committed to sharing knowledge, tips, tricks, techniques, and generally helping others learn and improve.
You can see the full list of vExpert 2015 list on the VMware blog site here.
Last year Cisco joined the ranks of companies running community recognition programs by creating their Cisco Champion program. These programs recognize those people who go above and beyond in their efforts to share knowledge — knowledge of products, techniques, tips and tricks, you name it.
In Cisco’s own words describing Cisco Champions:
Cisco Champions are passionate about Cisco and happy to share our knowledge, experience, and feedback.
Earlier this week VMware released the list of 2014 vExperts. The community recognition program has grown since its start in 2009, with 754 vExperts being named this year — the largest group yet.
I’m simultaneously proud and humbled to have been included in that list for my third year in a row. Looking over this year’s list I see a lot of heavy-hitters and folks I’ve come to respect for their knowledge and willingness to share what they’ve learned. It’s both an honor to be considered to be in the same group with them as well as a little scary in that humbling “wow-I’m-going-to-have-to-work-hard-to-keep-up” kind of way.
One of the things that I really like about the vExpert program is that it recognizes activity over expertise. Continue reading
Today EMC announced 
the “2014 edition” of their community recognition program, EMC Elect.
To borrow from the EMC Elect Community page, EMC Elect is a community-driven recognition. Candidates for this recognition have displayed three key characteristics:
