I’m honored to be named to this group for my 3rd year (announcement here).  I’ve seen value in the program because of the people, passion, and resources of this community.  As IT has changed from the mass adoption of virtualization to the cloud era we are all contending with ways to triangulate what really matters and what are the details.  As a vExpert I’ve had the opportunity to really put that in play directly with clients to help them come to a higher ground of understanding but more importantly to share the truth in the information triangulated across the vExperts and our community.

Being a vExpert at Technology Integration Group has been a great experience as well.  As a Practice Director for TIG I get to unleash a lot of what I get out of the program to provide leadership on advancing TIG’s portfolio and services to benefit clients.  I get to put it in motion visiting with a wide variety of client to help them advance their environments and go to the key trade shows like VMWorld and PEX.  I also get to channel it through developing the reps, engineers, and solution architects to both enter the VMware realm and to advance their knowledge beyond what is represented in training provided by VMware.  It’s a great ride unlocking and advancing VMware and the Software Defined Enterprise ….and giving away a bunch of cool SDDC rocks shirts 🙂

Thank you to John Troyer, Corey Romero, and VMware for assembling and persisting this program.  Thanks for the designation once again!

About “vExpert”

VMware has a program called the “vExpert Program”.  It’s for the people who have made significant contributions to vmware through leadership in blogs, speaking, technical evangelism, expertise, and so on.  This is the 5th year vmware has pulled this process together so thanks go out to John Troyer and the whole social media team with vmware.  The program has grown from 581 last year to 754 named this year. There are 3 paths to become a vExpert;

Evangelist Path
The Evangelist Path includes book authors, bloggers, tool builders, public speakers, VMTN contributors, and other IT professionals who share their knowledge and passion with others with the leverage of a personal public platform to reach many people. Employees of VMware can also apply via the Evangelist path. A VMware employee reference is recommended if your activities weren’t all in public or were in a language other than English.

Customer Path
The Customer Path is for leaders from VMware customer organizations. They have been internal champions in their organizations, or worked with VMware to build success stories, act as customer references, given public interviews, spoken at conferences, or were VMUG leaders. A VMware employee reference is recommended if your activities weren’t all in public.

VPN (VMware Partner Network) Path
The VPN Path is for employees of our partner companies who lead with passion and by example, who are committed to continuous learning through accreditations and certifications and to making their technical knowledge and expertise available to many. This can take shape of event participation, video, IP generation, as well as public speaking engagements. A VMware employee reference is required for VPN Path candidates.