David Messina, VP Marketing and Product Management, Xangati
What’s the best way to satisfy your cravings at Tech Field Day?
Step One: Tweet about it.
Step Two: Make sure you have Xangati as a follower.
Ah, the true power of social media—leveraging Twitter to obtain chocolate-covered espresso beans and bacon.
Interacting with the industry’s top virtualization bloggers, experiencing real-time tweets and live video streaming gave last week’s Tech Field Day a distinctly modern feel. And Xangati was delighted to harness social media for a good purpose—to provide the delegates with an apparently much-needed infusion of caffeine and processed pork at the end of Day #1.
Like a real-time dashboard—a la the Xangati Management Dashboard—Twitter gave us immediate insights into the delegates’ wants and needs at the event, so that we could take the steps to best meet those yearnings—in this case, running out for bacon and chocolate!
As delegate Tom Holllingsworth (@networkingnerd) summarized, “Bacon and chocolate-covered coffee beans are the best. bribes. evar.” Or, as Sean Clark (@vseanclark) wrote, Tech Field Day may “be the start of a bacon arms race.”
Tech Field Day really provided the perfect forum in which to satisfy all of our cravings. The event did a superb job of combining the power of social media and an informative technology platform into a highly organized and well-run event. Kudos to Gestalt IT and Steve Foskett—and a special thanks to Claire Chaplais—for making it such a success!
Aside from a decidedly strong penchant for bacon, the delegates were clearly there for the technology. The event is an opportunity for them to delve deep into the technology issues and being in a small group helped facilitate some good discussions and lively debate. This blogging crowd isn’t particularly keen on marketing fluff or analyst references!
As an engineering-driven company at heart, this worked out pretty well for Xangati.
We kept our focus on the meat of the matter—satisfying delegates’ desire for a technically-oriented discussion by giving them comprehensive and in-depth data that they, in turn, can share with their own followers—the VI and system administrators we also serve.
The features of our infrastructure performance management (IPM) solution have been carefully designed to meet the needs of VI administrators implementing virtualization technologies. We’ve been able to innovate and use the most advanced technologies to develop a solution that addresses these very specific management needs in the new paradigm of what is virtualized computing.
So much is about the ability to recognize a need that’s there and to take the steps to fulfill that need—much as we filled the delegates’ desires for an end-of-the-day “pick-me-up.”
Following our presentation, we hosted dinner and drinks at The Computer History Museum in Mountain View—a great venue—where we received a fitting demonstration of the Babbage Difference Engine No 2.
Charles Babbage was a technologist who saw a need before society even recognized that it had a need. He believed that his concept for a mechanical computer—conceived and published in 1837—would benefit mankind by taking what had been mental effort and making it mechanical. Babbage spent all of his fortune in his quest to make his mechanical machines a reality—something he never saw in his lifetime.
Today, with social media and advanced technology at our fingertips, we can more easily see and assess needs and take the steps to fill them and—unlike Babbage—can broadly and readily communicate about the value of what we’re doing. You need only to look at last week’s Tech Field Day #5 to see this.
Wow! So glad to be alive now when we have social media and Tech Field Day to help spread the word about the benefits of virtualization management!
Xangati will toast to that—with a Bacontini! Cheers, until next time…
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