Remember the movie Miracle on 34th St? For those of you who live under a rock the movie is about a little girl and her mother meeting the real Santa Claus. Santa for reasons still somewhat unclear went to work at Macy’s during his short offseason between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and did something crazy, he told customers where they could find specific toys for their kids at the competition. At first Mr. Macy was beside himself until he realized that the method built life long customers out of those who heard about it. In the movie the idea was more about the Christmas spirit than smart advertising, but in reality this method works really well. Take for example Progressive insurance who shows customers competitive pricing, before doing so they had annual sales of $3.4 billion and since implementing this tactic now have annual sales of $15 billion. Amazon uses similar tactics, that’s why they sell advertising to their competition. [1] In our industry even VMware uses this technique in vCAC integrated ITBM to show you what your cloud costs would be for AWS, Azure and vCHS.
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Feed it Forward
Pretty sure I haven’t written about the honor of vExpert and having received it for the last two years. There are many ways to obtain vExpert one of the key methods is community involvement, that means participating in and presenting at VMware User Groups (VMUGs). Think of VMUGs as a support group for VMware admins and business users, as well as a toastmasters training course. If you have ever wanted to learn to be a better public speaker and want to talk tech in doing so then speaking at a VMUG is a great opportunity. You can share your experiences or even your problems and get immediate feed back and help.
To that end Mike Laverick has helped to create the FeedForward Program to help mentor those interested in speaking at VMUGs. You can sign up as a mentor yourself if you wish and help others or sign up to be a mentee. The program is new and has some great potential and backers. In the end who knows once you start speaking you may love it, and in the next couple of quarters you may find yourself on the list of vExperts.
More info on FeedForward can be found here http://vmugvoice.vmug.com/2014/February14.htm
What’s in a name?
Let’s start off with a disclaimer: this blog is mine, opinions are my own. I work for EMC but these views and words are all mine. This isn’t the corporate line being towed.
Others have written about the Federation and how it works, they have touched on the co-opetition that exists between the companies.
So why do I feel compelled to write on it?
Well in part because I really don’t know how to keep my mouth shut. Also because just perhaps I have a slightly different view being new to this perspective. So without further ado: