I awoke this morning to the news that an announcement was made at DELL|EMC World that VMUG had been rolled into a the recently formed Dell Technologies User Community (DTUC – doesn’t quiet roll off the tongue now does it?) …I also awoke to a lot of VMware community backlash on Twitter not only in response to the news but also in the way in which it was not communicated to the existing local VMUG leadership and steering committee members.
From the reaction i’ve seen, most people are fairly ticked off with the fact that almost everybody found out about this through public channels…mainly Twitter. It’s worth watching the video below to get an overview of the changes from the VMUG President and CEO as it does go some way to clarifying the what’s what of the announcement.
.@MyVMUG announcement response from @grob4ever & @VMUG_CEO.https://t.co/jkQPbsKjB0#vBrownBag #vmug #DellEMCWorld #vmware @vBrownBag
— Brett johnson (@BrettJohnson008) May 8, 2017
Just to clarify, VMUG is not changing it’s name to DTUC.
My Take:
I think everybody knew that VMUG was in trouble from an organisational standpoint with a lot of changes during the first few months of 2017 and some interesting moves around the removing of Nutanix staff from leadership role. So this news isn’t a total surprise however for me, the one key ingredient that VMUG offered is now well and truly in danger of being wiped away…and that is it’s relative independence.
The VMUG community was born out of the technology ecosystem that grew around VMware’s success in the virtualization market and it meant that all of VMware’s technology and alliance partners where given a seat at the table in terms of event sponsorship and presentations. It was a place equally where smaller startup’s could come and talk about their new technology solutions and where the more established vendors could talk around why there where still cool and relevant.
Now, with DELL|EMC plus VMware product portfolio my fear is that finding sponsors will become even more of a challenge as it has been worldwide for the last 12 to 18 months. This is an interesting move but again, but not a surprising one given what I’ve seen with my involvement in VMUG over the past two years. It’s not all doom and gloom though as I feel the VMUG UserCons are still brilliant events as was the case with the recent ones held in Sydney and Melbourne.
Time will tell how this plays out, but there is one thing I believe the wider VMware community doesn’t want to see drop off or disappear…and that is the community it’s self!
