Category Archives: Business Trip

On Route To The MVP Summit 2012

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So here I go. I’m off the United States of America, Washington State, Seattle, Bellevue/Redmond. I’m travelling there to attend the MVP Summit 2012. I mentioned this already in a previous post I’m Attending The MVP Summit 2012

That means I’ll be rather quiet the next week. For one I’ll be very busy, both during the day as well as at night with all the meet ups and networking opportunities that are planned. On top of that all of the content & such is subject to a Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA). So no blogs, no tweets, nothing. If I see the Space Needle or visit any other interesting venues I might let you know Winking smile.

It’s great to see so many friends & colleagues converging to the Summit. I’ll be happy to meet up again and talk shop. A good number of them I have never met in person before and it will be fun to finally do so.

Right now I’ve parked myself in LHR waiting for my connecting flight to SEA. Sunny, day mild weather and I got a very friendly lift to the airport. Thanks! Time to grab a drink and spend some time looking at the airplanes landing & taking off. We’re an industrious little lot us humans, judged by the amount of travelling we do.

I hope I can grab some sleep on the flight over the big pond & I’m not to weary after that long haul. If not I have some books, music & movies to help pass the time. But it’s all good. I’m very fortunate to be able to attend the MVP Summit and I have every intention to make the most of this opportunity.

I’m Attending The MVP Summit 2012

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I’ll be attending the MVP Summit 2012 in Redmond from the 27th of February to the 2nd of March. I consider myself very lucky to be able to do so and I’m grateful that my employer is helping me make use of this opportunity. I appreciate that enormously.

So my hotel is booked, my flights are scheduled. It’s a long flight with a lengthy stopover in Heathrow. I actually spend a day travelling to and from the event. But I’m told it’s very much worth the effort Smile and I got some great tips from some veteran MVPs in the community. For newbies who can use some information on the MVP summit take a look at What to expect at your first MVP Summit by Pat Richard.

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I also look forward to meeting so many peers in person and attending all the briefings where we’ll learn a lot of valuable new things about Hyper-V. I cannot talk about them as they are under NDA but there will be many opportunities to provide feedback to the product teams in my expertise “Virtual Machine’” (i.e. Hyper-V). I have a bunch of questions & feedback for the product teams.

From my colleagues I have learned it’s also a good way to help pass feedback from others on to Microsoft. So this is your chance. Take it! What do you like or need in the virtualization products. What should be enhanced and what is hurting you? What works and what doesn’t?  What is missing?

With Windows 8 going into beta by next month don’t expect immediate actions and changes based on your feedback. But if you want to have your opinions taken into consideration you have to let them be heard. So don’t be shy now! Let me know. Sincere & real concerns, along with problems, challenges and feedback on your experiences with the product are very much appreciated.

So, if you have any remarks, feedback, feature requests you’d like to share with the virtualization product teams let me know. Just post them in the comments, send me a e-mail via the contact form or message me via @workinghardinit on twitter. My colleagues tell me the program managers in the virtualization area are a very communicative and responsive bunch. I think that’s true from my experiences with them in the past.

HP Discover 2011 in Vienna

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I’m off to Vienna (Austria) to attend HP Discover next week. The idea is to go look at their kit and learn a bit more about what’s available and possible. I hope to discuss their offerings with them and I will have storage as my main focus. This is because things are about to get busy in that area for us.  I’ll also provide them with some feedback on our experiences, what we like, don’t like etc. Call it “the good, the bad and the ugly" of free (no I don’t need or want a free Amazon gift card to provide it) customer feedback if you like.

I appreciate a chance to provide feedback to vendors directly and I do think it is important. Not because I have that much to say or have such a big impact but because apart from sales figures it’s the best way to help them and thus us as customers to get good things enhanced and broken stuff fixed.

If there is one thing that a lot of vendors are missing is a better view of the opportunities in the SME market that has a need for enterprise level features but on a smaller budget. That does exist and that market can be tapped more than it is now. Sometimes it seems like the commercial offerings in this market are divided in small & large and the sizes in between are crushed or forgotten between those two markets. I hear this a lot from colleagues & friends as well, so it’s not just me. We’re not the huge budget crowd but make up for that in numbers. We’ll see what HP has to offer that segment of the market in 2012.

Experts2Experts Conference London (UK) 2011

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I’m at the Experts2Experts Conference in London and I’m having a great time talking shop, tech & business with my fellow IT Pro colleagues from around Europe. Aidan Finn, Jeff Wouters, Carsten Rachfahl, Ronnie Isherwood.

It might be fun for Microsoft to join us for some of these lunch & dinner time dicussions. It would provide them with great feedback, ideas, concerns. Very educational. While we’re discussing Citrix, VMware, Microsoft & ISV solutions (RES, Appsense) this is not a vendor centric conference. Sure we all work with these products but we’re discussing it from our point of view. The challenges, the issues, the successes & failures are discussed and mentioned.

There’s a high density of virtualization, private cloud, desktop virtualization (VDI, Terminal Servers, Application Virtualization, Client hosted virtual desktops etc.) expertise at the conference to make it interesting.

Tomorrow I’ll be sharing some musings on “High Performance & High availability Networks for Hyper-V Clusters” during my session.