My thoughts on VMworld 2018 US: A non-technical perspective

Tommy Berry
Sep 6, 2018 · 6 min read

VMworld 2018 US marks the 7th VMworld I’ve had the pleasure of attending in my 3+ years as a member of the Social Media & Community team at VMware. One of the most rewarding parts of spending over half of the year planning for this event (seriously!) is the fact that my team actually gets to attend and interact with the community, unlike many of our digital marketing peers who must hold down the fort at home. My experience at VMworld is different than most because my time is spent highlighting news and announcements on social media and engaging with the community, rather than diving into the various sessions and training & certification opportunities. Here are my closing thoughts of VMworld 2018 US, from a non-technical perspective

So, what is it that you do?

So let’s start with my role at VMworld. As the social media manager I’m tasked with a few things: amplify all major news and announcements, live cover the general sessions (more on this later), capture conference highlights (pictures, videos), and most of all try to deliver the conference experience to our external audience that is unable to attend 😢. When you find me with my eyes not glued to my computer or phone, I try my best to mingle in the community space and meet some of the beautiful faces I know so well from Twitter, as well as pick up the slack at our front desk and around the booth.

Location

This was the last time we will be in Las Vegas for the foreseeable future now that Moscone Center is renovated and ready to host us once again. On one hand I prefer San Francisco because it’s driving distance from home and I don’t have to spend much, if any, time traveling (yay!). On the other hand Las Vegas is just a short flight away from home, there are plenty of affordable hotel rooms, and there’s lots to do for geeks and night owls alike. I’ll give a slight edge to Vegas because I like the mini-vacation. The first time I ever went to Vegas was for VMworld 2016, and the 3 times I’ve been back have been for VMworld in 2017 & 2018, as well as Dell Technologies World in April. Will I ever experience Vegas outside of a business trip? We may never know 🤔.

General Sessions

This year I got to do something different when it came to live coverage of the general sessions. In the past I’ve sat among the crowd and was that one guy who has the bright screen from his laptop shining the whole time while I attempted to juggle between tweeting out quotes that I didn’t quite understand, taking amateur photos of Pat on stage, and retweeting all of you like a madman to make the most noise on social as possible. I apologize if any of you unfollowed @VMware in the past during one of these tweet storms! This year there was a large focus on quality over quantity, and we wanted to add a real-time visual element. Enter the ability to, in real-time, cut up 30–60 second video snippets of the key moments from the general session and direct publish them out to social media from our streaming platform. See below..

While this may seem like a simple operation, it actually required quite a bit of work for a one-man crew. Each snippet took an incredible amount of time to identify, edit, save and publish — about 10 minutes per snippet (which is a lot for real-time coverage of an event). During the 10 minutes it took to prepare the snippet, who knows what I missed?! It all worked out in the end since the goal was just to focus on about 5 of the key moments of each session, but man, that was stressful. The coolest part about it was that I got to sit back-stage in order to do this, which meant I got to see Pat, Sanjay, Michael (Dell) and even Malala casually walking around before they went on. Here is an unglamorous picture of some production equipment.

Parties

Not much to write here, as I didn’t attend any (not even VMworld Fest shhh). Well, okay I did attend the vExpert party and the VMware {code} Hackathon. For the second year in a row the vExpert party was held at the Pinball Hall of Fame, and even Pat made an appearance. Not to mention the BBQ catering was unreal. The Hackathon had a great turnout. 150 people willing to spend their first night of VMworld hacking until 12am? Yes please! The winning team created a PowerShell/PowerCLI console built into the new HTML5 vSphere Client (someone please explain this to me). Either way, congrats Team vMafia! The reason I chose not to attend VMworld Fest this year is because one of my favorite bands, Midland, was playing the same night at the Flamingo, so I opted for that instead.

VMTN and VMware {code} Booth

Yes this is a shameless plug for my team, but I’m not sure “booth” is the correct word to use anymore — the community showed out this year and turned this into a can’t miss experience for all attendees. In addition to your 68 VMTN TechTalks, the classic blogger tables, and the podcast booths, this year we brought the VMware {code} experience to a new level. We added 60 Power Sessions, and a “Maker Space” for hands-on workshops featuring Raspberry Pi’s, and VMware’s Wavefront and Liota. We also “gamified” a lot of the community activities so you could earn {code} coin (digital currency built on VMware’s blockchain technology) and redeem those coins for some cool prizes like t-shirts, Bluetooth speakers, and a Nintendo NES. By adding those scanners that everyone loves to the front of our booth, we were able to track about 5K worth of foot traffic to our booth during the week, shattering previous years’ numbers.

What else?

In previous years I felt like I was just “the social media guy” and kept mostly to myself. This year I was able to break out of my shell and meet some really great people. The overwhelming amount of support I received after earning my VCA-DBT certification carried over into VMworld, and numerous people came up to congratulate me or start a conversation. VMworld is not about VMware or the products, it has always been about the people. VMworld brings together some of the smartest and friendliest people you will ever meet. I encourage everyone reading this to take full advantage of the networking and community opportunities that VMworld offers, it is unlike anything else I have ever experienced.

Until Barcleona.. thanks for reading!

And for those interested in social media..

There were a total of 62.2K brand mentions of VMworld last week, generating 97.3K engagements, with a potential reach of 1.1B (I’m a little skeptical of this one too). Thanks for everyone who joined the social conversation!

I do social media for VMware. Amateur coffee and craft beer critic.

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