Is VMUG still independent? - CTO Advisor 051

Machine-generated from the episode audio and not hand-corrected, so names and technical terms may be imperfect. The audio is authoritative.

All right, so let's preference this episode of CTO advisor episode, I think we'll call it 51. We have Brad Thompson, CEO of VMA on me and Mark X. Brad, some really tough questions around the changes within the Dell communities and how that impacts VMA. The unfortunately, at the near the end of the podcast, our SD card in our recorder corrupted and we didn't get the chance to ask some of the question that happened a few months ago with leaders being asked to step down because of their vendor role.

I just let the podcast roll to the end of that. I'm going to close out. And again, apologize. Apologies for not getting that second tough question in. But I think Brad was pretty forthcoming. I hope you enjoy the podcast. All right, coming to you fresh, day three of Dell EMC World 2017. com. Co-host, Keith. Wait, hold on. Did I pay you in prongs last night? No, someone else paid me in prongs last night. You didn't pay.

That is true. And I was there. That is true. So technically, that was your... And you outnumbered me. Townsend outnumbered me. Yes, Townsend outnumbered me. My lovely wife was at dinner. And thank you to Deep Storage for hosting an influencer dinner again at Dell EMC World 2017. So this is a special episode. So Brad, we scheduled this kind of like ad hoc. I do work for, disclaimer, I do work for VMUG. I'm the content manager.

What is my title? I don't even know if I have a title. I don't know. I don't know that we came up with a title. Keith, I like that. We just call you the CTO advisor. There you go. That's what we call you. So I said, you know what, Brad, I'm doing a podcast. How would you like to join? And he was like, sure. And it turns out this may be probably the most downloaded podcast that I ever have because I'll get a bunch of VMUG guys downloading the podcast.

So Brad, for those that don't know you, can you introduce yourself? Yes. So I'm Brad Tompkins. I'm the CEO of VMUG. So what is VMUG? Because this is a CTO level podcast, architecture level. What is VMUG and why is it important to CTOs, architects that don't know about it? Great question. So VMUG is the VMware Users Group. So it's very important to realize that we are an independent organization. We are completely independent from VMware, but we are tightly aligned.

After all, we are the VMware Users Group. So we are tightly aligned with VMware. And what that means is we are able to have deeper access and a very strong partnership with VMware that we can then turn and create benefits for our members who are all VMware users. The purpose of VMUG is simply to educate people and allow them to maximize their VMware investment. And we do that through events that we have both in person and online. We have online communities.

And it's really about the community getting together and sharing their knowledge. We like to call it the connect, learn, lead cycle. And that's what we're all about. Our membership is free. Our events are free. And you definitely should check it out. For C-level folks, a lot of ones that I talk to are like, this is a great community. And it's one that you definitely need to get your employees involved in. And so we appreciate that as well.

But we also have some C-level folks that attend as well, especially our local events, our user cons, that will have some pretty headlining keynotes out there. So something to keep on the lookout for. com is where all the information is. So I want to dive into. You're going to steal my question, Keith? Well, let's see. I'm going to say. Go ahead. Well, actually, it's not a question. I think I want to enhance a comment that you made.

Independent plus aligned. You know, I've worked with you guys for the past year on helping you with your content strategy. And a lot of times content comes up that's not really glowing for VMware. You know, there's been, you know, the whole, you know, NXX is great, but it's expensive. It's hard to deploy. There's been people who, there's been sponsors and groups that have competing products, we'd like to say, but not their message is aligned. So you guys haven't shied away from having sponsors that necessarily compete with VMware in non-core areas and letting them come with their message that's helpful to the VMUG community just as long as it's aligned to VMware.

So there's a difference between independence and alignment. That's right. That's right. And sometimes that's a tricky line that we have to manage. But at the end of the day, we want people to come to our events and come to our community to get the information they need, again, to maximize their VMware investment. And so when partners are out there, and this has happened both as VMware's partners has increased on what they have offered, and sometimes that overlaps into competition. But also VMware has expanded.

And so, you know, a few years ago, they were in different businesses, and now they're seeing that they're competing with some of the partners that they have. And VMware is great about having an open ecosystem and kind of welcoming everybody and saying, look, let's just, you know, we're all in this together. Let's figure out how to make it work. But we do ask our sponsors, you have to talk about how your product complements the VMware environment because we are the VMware user group.

And people are there to learn how to enhance their VMware environment. So talking about enhancing a different environment, it just doesn't make sense to do that at a VMUG. That's a message that they can do wherever else they want to do it, but not at a VMUG. And most everybody understands that. They agree with that, and they get the partnership not only with VMUG, but with VMware as well. So you guys recently made an announcement. Yes. It's the same VMUG.

Is it still VMUG? It is definitely still VMUG. So not Michael Dell Mug? No, no, none of that. So a little bit of history on this. It was, we had a leader summit. So before we get into that, can you just say what actually happened for anybody who doesn't know what the announcement was? Yeah, sure. So what the announcement was, was just the announcement of the Dell Technology User Communities. And what that simply is, is that is just a collection of independent user groups that all happen to be supporting the solutions of the Dell Technologies brand.

For instance, we've got VMUG. Obviously, VMware is part of the Dell Technologies group. So VMUG is the VMware user group. We're an independent organization. You also have Converge. Now, they just had a name change. They used to be the VCE user group. So now VCE is no longer. Now it's Dell EMC. So they changed their name to Converge. That's another independent user group. There's the Precision User Group. There's the Boomi User Group. And there's also the HPC User Group, the High Performance Computing User Group.

All of those remain independent. Business is usable for VMUG. We actually had the least amount of change for our infrastructure and our structure because we were so tightly aligned with VMware and it kind of fell in. We had no name change. We had nothing else that we needed to do. So I want to be clear on this. So the Dell Technology User Community is not an entity. It is simply a website and a collection of independent user groups.

com, you're going to see all five of those user groups. You click on that, and then you're at the independent pages of those respective groups. So I want to make sure I enhance this because I was on a queue for the past couple of days, and I've talked to Ben Clayton, the president of VMUG, and then as well as Karen Quintos, the chief customer officer of Dell Communities. And, you know, this is before the kind of announcement, and we're talking about the relationship between VMUG and Dell Communities, as well as once the Kerfuffle hit yesterday, I had Pat Gelsinger on the queue, and I asked him flat out about, you know, VMware.

Every time VMware is sold, and it's weird to say this because, you know, VMware is a major company, but they were sold to EMC. And then when EMC was sold, one of the things that – and I'm a VMUG member first and foremost, and I'm a VMware customer, and we're very passionate about what Pat calls the glue of the infrastructure. You know, you go to a conference like VMworld, we like to tease and say VMworld is the biggest storage conference of the year because the ecosystem or ecosystem around VMware is so large, from server vendors to storage vendors.

So when someone the scale of Dell buys VMware, we're hypersensitive to that impact. So I asked Pat about that, about, you know, we seem to get two conflicting messages. One from Michael on, you know what, Dell Technologies has this def, these families of companies that add value collectively that no other vendor can add. That's true, but not all of us are Dell server customers, EMC array customers, and that's what VMUG has been about traditionally, being able to come to stitch together different solutions.

And I think some of the angst is that I think people think that that's gone away. Right. What do you think? You know, so I'm a leader in the Cincinnati VMUG, and the first thing I heard from some of my co-leaders is what's going on? We're a Dell user group now? I don't want to talk about Boomi or RSA or any of those things. So as a leader, what's going to change? m.? So fundamentally nothing changes. You're going to still do your local groups like you have.

You're still going to interact with the same sponsors that you have. User cons are going to have the same sponsors that we've had in the past. But what I do think that the change that you could see that you, if you choose to take advantage of, you can, and that would be based off if it fits in your environment, the ability to now reach out to other communities like a Converge community or a Precision community and say, OK, I am part of VMUG, and I'm interested in these other products because you deploy them in your offices or whatever the case may be.

And then, OK, now I know a place I can go to to get the information that I might need to, again, enhance the infrastructure and enhance my environment. Now, that's something that might not fit for everybody. For instance, if you don't use Dell products, then that would be an opportunity. That would be an area that you probably wouldn't want to investigate. And that is completely fine, completely fine. VMUG is not the only community out there. There's tons of people in the community.

IT industry as a whole has got many, many different vendors, many, many different solutions. And so we want to empower our members to get the information to make the best decision for their environment. And if that's VMware, great. If that's Dell, great. If it's not, that's OK, too. We still want to give them the information to make the best decision for their business. So the world's not burning. The sun's still rising and going to set. Absolutely. And essentially nothing's going to change except I have wider people to reach out to if I want to.

That's right. And that's why we thought this was very important and we're excited about it because it's about expanding the community. And we realize the community is not just VMUG. Again, it's multiple people out there. It's multiple vendors. It's multiple solutions. So the more access and the more options we can give our members, we feel like that's a good thing. So let's talk about the logistics behind the announcement. How was it intended to be announced? OK, so it was intended to be announced.

And, in fact, Dell asked us to hold the announcement back and not mention anything. And they wanted to announce it here at Dell World, which they did. And because we really had no changes on our side, there was many of the groups that had to go through name changes. They were dealing with website changes and all that goes around that when you change the name. We were like, you know what, you want to announce this about the Dell technology user community.

And there's really not a whole lot of change on our side. So we were fine to just say, yes, announce this at Dell EMC World. We were asked to be here. We're on the trade show floor. And so it was a great opportunity for us to evangelize on VMUG's behalf. And they asked us, you know, can we just hold announcements until Dell EMC? And we agreed to it. And then I think it was mentioned, because I was looking at the cube and I was like, OK, Karen and Ben are going to get interviewed on the cube.

I'm like, what is that all about? And I think what was one of the missteps is that from the big stage, Dell was supposed to announce the community. And that was kind of missed. And that was kind of a missed opportunity even for Ben and Karen to expand upon that on their interview and to start to message out on the various platforms. So what's the plan now? Now that you guys kind of missed that big opportunity to have the plant roll out, this podcast is obviously one medium.

Any other plans on messaging? Or is it just, you know, this is what it is. VMUG really hasn't changed. And for the Dell communities, there's change, but not so much for VMUG. Right. So we do have leader calls. In fact, after leaving this, I've gotten multiple leader calls. We do those all across time zones to accommodate for APJ and for our global list of leaders all over the place. We're doing that. We also have some communication out on our community website as well.

I've had a lot of interaction on Twitter, obviously, and trying to respond to everybody on that. So that's really anywhere and everywhere. We did a vBrownBag on it as well to get the message out. So this is something that, you know, there isn't a whole lot of change on our side. We did feel like it was a big announcement more on the Dell side. But we're happy to be here, and we want to get the message out. So I appreciate you having me on this podcast.

So I did have a question. How did we get here? How did we go from VMUG, independent but coupled, to where? What was the history that brought us to this point? From a Dell Technologies user community perspective? Yeah. So back in, I think it was a few years ago, we had a leader summit out in Palo Alto. And Pat Gelsinger was speaking at the leader summit, and we had a good day and a half full of events. Well, by happenstance, Michael Dell was there because this was when the announcements was coming about, you know, the acquisition and those kind of things.

So he was at a reception that we had for our leaders. And he was amazed at how passionate our leaders were and what an advocate that they could be as a voice back to VMware and, you know, soon to be Dell Technologies. And so that's when the conversation started. So then we sat down with Dell, and they were like, you know, VMUG, you are the gold standard. You have really grown this. We want to take what you have done, and how do we duplicate that across our other portfolio of products?

And they asked us for our help, and we started those conversations there, and that's how we ended up here. So it's one of these things that we were, you know, obviously honored to be asked and to participate in this. They saw the value in VMUG and what we have done in our infrastructure, obviously growing to over 130,000 members. You know, it takes some infrastructure to do that. But the key thing is they understood, they, being Dell, understood and want to remain, keep the independence there.

They want that to remain with us, and they see that as a key part of the user community. So it was really more of a, hey, we want to learn, help us grow this in the other platforms, but it's very much a hands-off approach. And they're like, we don't want to mess with anything, and they're not asking us to do anything as far as making changes or being involved in the program. They're like, you've got this down. You keep doing what you're doing.

The leaders keep doing what you're doing. Your board keep doing what you're doing. And they just wanted to be able to learn from some of the things that we've done and the successes that we've had. All right, so those were the unexpected questions. Now we're going to ask you the tough questions. This is easy. Because the CTO Advisor, independent thing, so we're all about community. And, again, VMUG is, I don't know if there's been a user group like VMUG in the past.

Yeah, I don't think so. Yeah, this has meant so much to, you talk to the members. You guys do these videos at the user cons. You talk to the members. VMUG has changed people's lives. Right, it's my VMUG. People feel that sense of ownership, which is, I think, why they have such a visceral reaction to change. You know, I look at the work that leaders do, Mark. I'm amazed at the amount of time you guys give up to pour into other people's lives that they learn these technologies and that they do some amazing things as a result of that knowledge.

So when there's changes at that leadership level, there's going to be some reaction. So a few months ago, you know, you guys, this is talking about alignment versus independence. You guys had to make some tough decisions about the community and leaders in the community. We don't need to go into specific vendors. But help us put some rails around, when is it okay for a vendor to be a VMUG leader? Because we know how these things happen. If you're a leader, your career changes.

You meet a lot more people, and when you meet more people, you have more opportunities.