A recommitment to the community

A few weeks ago the Western PA VMUG leaders decided to get together and talk about our local group and things that we each were concerned about.  The leadership team consists of Eric Kubla, David Hewett, Thomas Higgins, Eric Pond and myself with Alex Musicante being our primary contact with VMware (he was also a a very dedicated leader before working for VMware). We needed to discuss the upcoming VMUG meeting, which focused on recapping VMworld, this is a great meeting for users who were not fortunate enough to attend the conference. We also needed to coordinate the details for our celebration event that is held in December.  The VMworld recap always draws a great crowd, everyone wants to hear and see a presence from VMware.  But there lies the problem, we were not seeing much support from VMware at meetings and we had a Western PA dinner in San Francisco and not one VMware employee showed up for that either (we had many VMware employees sign up for the event).  Not only did the leadership team notice the lack of a VMware presence, we got negative feedback from some local members of the group.  Alex assured everyone that he would reach out to VMware and VMUG and let them know our concerns. This commitment involved helping drive attendance and have a VMware presence for the upcoming meetings and beyond.

Fast forward to the VMworld Recap VMUG meeting and we had a great turnout and the strongest presence from VMware that I have ever seen.  We had 11 VMware employees show up for the meeting and they also did a great job of promoting the event to their customers. Ed Bontempo did an excellent job on presenting and we had a packed room.  Alex was very instrumental in helping make the meeting a success and it shows how much he cares about the success of Western PA VMUG.