One of the reasons I started my blog was I hoped to bring to the readers the perspective of someone who has been on the “outside” of corporate for many years and is now “inside” corporate as part of EMC’s Office of the CTO. One of my first projects in my new role was planning, and executing the EMC Office of CTO activities at VMworld this year.
The process was interesting and challenging since my new team had not represented EMC at VMworld previously. The planning and content development required the transition through five distinct phases: Educating, Brainstorming, Socialize, Partnering, and Execution.
The first phase was educating the team on the expectations of a typical VMworld attendee. VMworld attendees are interested in learning about new ways to leverage their VMware investment. This year there is major interest in network virtualization, and software defined storage solutions by our customers. I met with many of the EMC OCTO leadership, and staff educating the team about the event. I could feel the excitement building with the team as they share my enthusiasm to share our team’s knowledge.
The second phase was brainstorming with the OCTO team to identify the projects that could be leveraged for VMworld. Several factors had to be considered in these discussions including the timeframe when product, or technology would be available to share with public. Much of the technology we are working on in OCTO in advance of VMworld is beta or earlier with immature functionality.
The third phase was socializing the value EMC OCTO could provide to VMworld. The socialization phase had to be executed internally and externally. Externally we had to help shape, and support the EMC themes for VMworld. Internally OCTO had no budget planned for VMworld. Luckily we had great support by our new CTO, John Roese and his senior leadership team. The leader of our new customer facing Open Innovation Lab, Bala Ganeshan was instrumental. Working with Bala we identified a Big Data Analytics project based on Hadoop that we are featuring in our show floor booth. The project is called the EMC Hadoop Starter Kit whichJames Ruddy and I preview in our talk this week here.
The forth phase was partnering with the EMC Solutions Marketing that is coordinating EMC’s overall EMC presence at VMworld. Working with them we proposed:
- Owning the Technology Preview conversation station for our show floor booth
- Release Hadoop Starter Kit solution
- Customer meetings with our subject matter experts
- Presentation at Storage Futures session
- CTO Roundtable meeting
The CTO round table is a new event envisioned by the leader of our Technology Standards and Industry Collaboration (TSIC) team, Sheryl Chamberlain. This is an exciting event with a dozen industry leading CTO’s and a panel including EMC’s CTO of XtremIO, Robin Ren and Scott Lowe. Sheryl and I talk about the CTO round table event here if you’d like more information.
The final phase was execution, which we are still working on finishing today. During the execution phase we partnered with EMC Product teams and our Solutions Marketing team led by Jim Sanzone, and Jon Owings to create demo’s for the show floor booth. In addition, a number of teams from the EMC CTO office created content for the VMworld events including EMC Distinguished Engineer, David Black who is representing EMC in the STO5559: Storage Futures breakout session. The storage futures session is always one of the most attended sessions of the conference. It is not to be missed.
This process has been very successful for jump starting the EMC OCTO team engagement at a major conference like VMworld. Each phase set up the subsequent phases. The education phase sparked the brainstorming phase that fed the enthusiasm that became contagious during the socialization phase. The socialization phase identified the key people we needed to partner to successfully execute. Even though I had major roles helping EMC prep for VMworld in the past, this project required me to slow down and execute the education phase which key to getting all the great resources to help us all work to help EMC deliver a valuable and fresh VMworld program. I am interested in your feedback.
What were your experiences preparing for VMworld?
Did you think EMC did a good job at VMworld?
Comments