Last week I attended my second Melbourne VMUG User Conference. The UserCon was again well attended and the Melbourne VMUG Team did a great job putting together a VMWorld Standard Lineup filled with excellent content …highlighted by Keynotes from John Troyer (@JTroyer) and Chad Sakac (@sakacc) as well as Vaughn Stewart (@vStewed).

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I flew in early to catch one of my favourite Bands, Papa Roach play a show at The Forum Melbourne. We talk about passion often in the vExpert Community and Papa Roach are certainly not short of passion and energy and I had a great time during a high octane one and half hour set. I had waited 15+ years to see this band and I wasn’t going to miss out on grabbing the opportunity to see them…I’ll tie that in later in the post!

Back to the UserCon, I wanted to focus on the Keynote from John…His presentation was based around a change of expectation around what it is to be part of the IT Industry…and even though there are some IT Professionals that will not embrace the shift that’s currently happening…the VMware/vExpert/Virtualization/Cloud Community is at the forefront of driving that change and best positioned to harness the pivot that’s currently on offer.

So what is this pivot?

Technologies like Containers (Docker) and processes like System and Service Automation (APIs, Orchestration Management) are challenging how we have done things for the past 10+ years since the Virtualisation revolution began last decade and there are a number of movements (DevOps -sic) that are trying to gain traction in the industry with a commonly held thought that if change isn’t embraced those that choose to stay still will be left behind…Pivoting is being used to describe this change of direction…it’s popular in the Startup world as described by Silicon Valley.

Pivoting was referenced a lot during the day and featured heavily in the closing Keynote from Vaughn and Chad around what the Storage Industry is doing to keep up with disruptive change being introduced by new Vendors…However pivoting as it relates to an IT Professionals jobs is probably not representative of this New IT spoken by John. The message from John’s keynote that resonated with me the most was in regards to the work done outside a persons job description…its the side projects that drive change.

For me this is what New IT refers to…Passion driving innovation that drives learning and discovery of new technologies such as those mentioned above. Those lacking in passion in my opinion are likely to be left behind because the industry is shifting quicker than ever and most of what’s new can only be discovered by those who want to learn. John knows first hand the value of being interested outside the square…more than anyone in Tech community he has been responsible for a lot of IT Pro’s following their passion…diving into side projects and in that creating content that’s shared in the form of Blog Posts and other mechanisms are then hopefully used by others passionate enough to dive into their own new side projects…and so the cycle goes.

I talked about Grabbing the Opportunity earlier in the post and for those interested enough to look to better themselves the time is now to grab on and ride your on wave…have a listen at John’s full talk below and ask yourself if taking part in the New IT is worth it?

…the answer should be “YES!”