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:
