The annual call for content for VMworld is now open through April 16th, however this year VMware has changed the submission process and is basically only looking for customer case studies. Instead of the old form where you did an abstract, outline and key takeaways on whatever topic you wanted, now you fill out a simple speaker interest form where you enter your name, title and how many case studies you want to submit (2 max) and then you fill in the following:
- What problem(s) did you or your customer face?
- On which solution(s) did you decide?
- How did you implement those solution(s)?
- What factors contributed to your or your customer’s success or failure?
VMware has made this change to “lighten the submission load”, if you read into that it sounds like VMware wants to limit the submissions to be only case studies which will greatly reduce the amount of sessions they need to review (and ultimately reject). As a result this basically excludes the traditional deep dives, panels and other technical types of sessions that were popular in years past.
The good ole days were you had a decent shot of getting a session through have been gone for many years. VMware’s own sessions dominate the session catalog these days and if you want to get a session you have to pretty much buy one through a sponsorship. It’s a shame as there is a whole community full of people that have valuable knowledge to contribute. To a lesser degree they have a platform in social area of VMworld but it would be nice if VMware dedicated some session slots to community content. Below are the types of speaking opportunities available this year:
I may try and submit one on VVols as case studies are sorely needed to promote it, but finding customers able and willing to participate is always a challenge. If any HPE customers are using VVols and are interested in presenting please let me know and I’ll work with you to submit a request. And for those that want to try and submit a session request you can go fill out either the general speaker interest form or the {code} speaker interest form. The links to submit and guidelines are available in this form.
1 comment
Interesting, thanks for sharing! As a long-time VMWorld attendee, one of the attractive parts of the conference has always been the amount of ‘deep’ material presented, unlike other vendor conferences that have more of a preponderance of ‘sales’ types of sessions. While some Case Study presentations can be interesting, I generally don’t group these into the more attractive ‘deep’ sessions.
I have noticed over the past few years that more and more of the content sessions were being run by VMware employees, which is fine as long as the content is adequate. I am hoping that the change in submission policy is only an indication that this trend will continue and that there will not be an undue shift away from deep content sessions towards more case study sessions.
If there is such a switch in session focus, I for one would see that as the reason why I would not attend. I am already dreading the move back to SF this year…absolutely ridiculous the cost of travel to SF vs. places like Vegas. Will literally spend 3x the amount on hotel alone in SF.