 the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2015. Brought to you by VMworld and its ecosystem sponsors. Now, your host, Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely. Welcome back to theCUBE at VMworld 2015. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host for this segment is Brian Gracely. Pleased to have first time guest on theCUBE and newly appointed CEO of the VMware User Group for what we all call Vmug, is Brad Tompkins. Brad, thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me, I'm excited to be here. All right, so the Vmug organization doesn't need any introduction to our audience here at VMworld, our sixth year at the show. Brian and I have worked with VMware many years, both of the experts, but it gives a little bit about your background and what led you to this role. So prior to being the CEO of Vmug, I worked for a infrastructure as a service provider and they were a part of the VCloud Air Network and we also did co-location. Prior to that, I worked for a company that focused on the insurance industry and delivering business process outsourcing and I was over the infrastructure and we use VMware, we replicated, use SRN, recovery point appliance and those kind of things. So that's my background. Back in 2010, I was involved in other user groups and that's kind of got me my taste for the user group and how they operate. And so when I got a phone call about Vmug, I'd been a member for a while and they said, are you interested? And of course I jumped at that opportunity. So a few interviews later and here I am. All right, so that's excellent. So while people know the Vmug, maybe you can give us just a little bit insight about the structure, am I understanding, CEO's brand new role and you're the first one, right? That's right. So help unpack that for us some. So what happened, as you know, Vmug started in 2010 and since then we've grown to over 100,000 active members and at that point the board had a consultant come in and they said, you know, for y'all to get to that next level you need to think about your structure and the board realized that and their recommendation was to go out and hire a CEO, which they did and then it's my job to kind of build out that structure and see what it's gonna take to get Vmug to the next level as we continue to grow. Excellent, excellent. So what does Vmug aspire to? So, you know, user groups have been around for a while. Some of them are enormous. SAP has an enormous one. What is, how does VMware think about their user group as the company diversifies? I mean, you've got them originally being virtualization. We see Pat talking about cloud and user computing. How do you guys think about, you know, Vmug, you know, you're talking about taking it to a bigger thing? How does it evolve along with Vmware or do you have different sort of ways to think about how Vmug evolves? Well, we're an independent organization but obviously we're tightly aligned with Vmware and keeping up with everything that Vmware does is can be difficult and challenging. But what we want to do is we do wanna align with each of their business units and the support that we get from those business units is tremendous. And they see us as a value for them to be able to get their message out to market and we're also there to help as a sounding board if something should come up that they won't feedback from their users, they look to us and they say, okay, this is the issue that we're having. How can Vmug help us with that? So it's really a joint partnership and it has worked really well and they see tremendous value in the user group and obviously we see tremendous value having that access and insight into Vmware that not only helps Vmug as an organization but it helps us deliver more value proposition to our members. So Brad, I've talked to the community a bunch and Vmware really is the company that helped drove server virtualization across the industry. They didn't come up with virtualization. It existed for a bunch of years. I mean, my mainframe friends, talk about how many decades it's been around. There's a lot of areas that both Vmware and the Vmug are going into educating on. You came from an infrastructure as a service company. Vmware is a piece of a broad ecosystem. So what do you say to people that say, well, is it too Vmware focused? I need to help educate this community about, things like cloud and things like the emerging markets of what's happening and how storage and networking and virtualization goes in. What do you say that people ask about a kind of a very much Vmware centric focus versus more of just broader educational role? So the purpose of Vmug is education and then that's what we want to do. That's one of the main benefits we give to our members and Vmware, as you can see today with a lot of the keynotes in the past week, they understand that most customers have a multivendor environment. So we're able to partner with other folks, strategic partners of Vmware to kind of help build that complete solution. Another role that I believe we play is helping our members know what's next, what's coming down the pipe. What do you need to know about in the future? We can help them out with their job now, but we need to help them out with their job of the future. And that's where as Vmware expands out into different areas that we want to be there with the forefront and say, okay, here is some information for you to use as a member to know what's coming and know what to be prepared for. And let's face it, in some cases, that might not be a Vmware solution, but Vmware can help educate them on the industry that's coming and then they can make intelligent decisions for their businesses on how to move forward. Yeah, we were talking in the introduction section, you know, Pat laid out a vision for the next 30 years, you know, kind of far reaching. We got some feedback from just talking to people in the hallways, you know, sometimes it feels like, you know, it's going too fast, it's too far out there. What do you hear from your community? Do they feel like what you guys are presenting is the right sort of timeline? Is it, do you have to sort of, do you struggle with how much is new versus sort of future looking to help them drive their careers? How do you balance that? It is a challenging balance and we do take feedback from our members to try to get what balance that they need, but we spend a tremendous amount of time trying to figure out what's coming next so we can kind of sprinkle that in and let people know, hey, you need to be aware of this. Another reason we do this is we want to diversify our member base. DevOps, heard a lot about DevOps here. I want to find out how we can better tap into the DevOps community and not, I think their opinion of E-Mung might be, oh, it's just, you know, server virtualization group. Well, that's not the case and so we need to be able to appeal to them, bring them in the community and then you've got a room where you've got DevOps sitting at the table next to the server virtualization guys, next to the AirWatch guys, next to the NSX guys and that's where really things can start to gel and they can take their businesses and their career forward. All right, so Brad, if I understand it, there's a little bit of a reorg that's finalizing for just kind of V-Mug as a structure maybe over the next couple of months. You know, I'm not quite sure I've got that right. Maybe you could explain, but the question I have is in your role as CEO, you've got a number of constituencies. You've got all these people that are doing their time, effort and energy to help build these communities, do the local chapters. You've got the sponsors that help bring this in and then you've got the attendees. How do you look at these constituencies and what do you expect to see your role and your vision going forward? Well, my role and vision as with V-Mug is to continue to drive the value prop for our members. You know, you mentioned our volunteer leaders. What makes V-Mug so great is those passionate members and passionate leaders that we have. We have over 230 chapters across the world. We have 500 local events. We do 40 plus user cons across the globe. All that couldn't be possible without the leaders. Now that being said, there is an infrastructure behind the scenes that supports that and that's where my role and the staff roles, they come in. So I am looking at doing some things on the organization of that and how can we serve our members better and our leaders better so they can do what they do best out there in the field. And I think by doing that, we really need to look at V-Mug as a business. And so part of my job is the business aspect of V-Mug, how do I make us viable and have a path forward for the future? And our board of directors are all customer led and the vision that they have is tremendous and they know where they want V-Mug to go. They hired me to make that vision a reality. Yeah, so in the interaction we were talking about, if you look at the bloggers that are out there, one of the challenges you have is, sometimes you're a good blogger and you get sucked up by a company and now you're a vendor. And is that same person still the same writer? You know, we understand where his paycheck comes, but there's some great writers out there that I've seen them work in many jobs and I follow their writing no matter where they go. With the V-Mug, you get a lot of visibility when you're running this and some of them have got sucked up by vendors and that means, well, I need to go find a leader which it's tough to always backfill. What do you see with that? Is there any way that somebody working for a vendor can still be a leader of a V-Mug? We see that happen all the time and it's really kind of the double-edged sword. We tell folks there's a lot of things you can get out of V-Mug and being involved in the user group. I've been involved in user groups my whole career and now it is my career. So I mean I'm a prime example. So we encourage folks to step outside of their norm and say, you know what, if there's things you wanna do, I was speaking with one of our leaders at the V-Mug lounge and he said, I wanted to be more comfortable and fun to public speaking. So he took on the V-Mug leadership role, got that comfort, added a skill set and this is a non-technology skill set. Next thing you know, vendor scoops them up and now he's progressed his career through V-Mug. We love hearing that story, that's great. The problem is then we have to backfill that position and we do look for customers to lead and be the head of the local groups. That's our design. But it doesn't mean that partners can't participate. You know, partners are a key part of V-Mug and they are needed as well to make this whole ecosystem work. So there's ways that they can get plugged in other than just booth duty. They can have leadership roles and be a part of it. But we do want to have the local leader to be the face of the group to be a customer. We were, another thing we were talking about in the introduction is there are so many fire hoses of information, whether it's here at VMworld or it's just day to day, week to week. I know myself personally, I get emails every day from just in the Raleigh area where I'm from, a meetup about this, a meetup about that. The meetup scene has become so much more about education, about community education. How do you have to think about that? Because obviously as CEO you have to present the V-Mug as a sort of a competitive product. You're competing for people's time, their information, their learning. How is that shifting from what it was in 2010? Do you have to think about more frequent events? Do you have to think about different locations? Or is anything radically changing given how other people are trying to educate their communities? Well we always want to evolve our events and that is things that we look at and it might be taking user cons and how do we tweak those and make those better? Also we're looking at what new events do we need to have out there to hit our audience? And that's going to be the traditional vSphere server virtualization audience, but as I mentioned before, it also can be other audiences. So we want to align up with the business units of VMware, but we also want to see what other kind of segmentation can we do? That might be geographical, it might be industry, it might be skill set, in that way, any member that comes to us, regardless of where they are, north, south, east, west in their career, they can find a way to plug in with BMUG and better themselves and also learn more about the virtualization industry that we're all in. And I think that's one of the things that we really need to focus on for next year to how do we do that and how do we keep up with all the different business units and industries that VMware is in? You got a lot of balls to juggle one of those like that. So, Brad, my understanding is actually your first time coming to VMworld. Curious as to what your experience has been so far and how does the VMworld cadence the twice a year event feed into what happens in VMUGs around the world? So we obviously kind of take a little break from our user cons before and after VMworld for obvious reasons. This is a tremendous event and VMware allows us to have a large presence here, which is wonderful and so we appreciate VMware support on that. But the event this week has just been phenomenal. I've obviously attended numerous different events in the past, maybe not VMworld but other events, but this is really even a lot bigger than I had expected. It's amazing to see the mass of people, the opening session the first day. I mean, it was out the building when people lining up to go into. But what I find so interesting is just the energy I get, not only from listening to Pat and listening to Sanjay and listening to VMware folks speak, but also listening to our leaders and our members. I was able to meet a lot of them today, a lot of them I had kind of met, so to speak, on Twitter, but it's nice to put a face to the Twitter handle. And we have an active community in many different ways and it's just been exhilarating. I think my body is telling me that it's time to start slowing down but my mind is going 90 miles an hour and it's like give me more, give me more. Yeah, no, I hear I woke up an hour before my alarm this morning, which was really early before the sun was up and the brain starts going. So last question I have for you is how do you balance like trying to get everybody on the same page from the training standpoint and still allowing the local chapters to have local flavors? I mean, I know a bunch of the V-Mug leaders, they're just really cool things. I mean, the Indie V-Mug have done some awesome stuff down your neck of the woods, really understand. We've got some great heritage up in the New England area where I'm from with the V-Mug team. So how do you help learn across the organizations, share ideas across the organizations and let kind of all those local ideas both flourish and feed back into the organization? Right, so that is something that I talk to my leaders about a lot and I tell them staff is here, use them as needed. A more mature user con, they know what they're doing, they got it down and it might be staff, I need you to organize the lunch or pick the venue or work out this contract. Other groups that are less mature, they really lean more heavily on staff and they do a lot more of it. We're good either way, we wanna have a good event. And if it's people that have the time and the passion they want to be more involved in it, we let the leaders do that. They know the local area, they spice it up, Indie, we had a little Indie car racing and things like that. So it makes it more personal, which is what we want to attract those local folks, but we're here to have the back-in office support that's needed. So also by doing that, it allows our staff and headquarters to kind of have one place where all the good ideas are. And it's another group comes in and say, hey, I was thinking about that. Oh well, Kansas City has done that and it worked out well. Or we did this in Milan and it worked out well. So those kind of things we're able to share, along with just getting together at events like VMworld to sit down face-to-face. The V-Mug Lounge has been extremely busy, very pleased to see that. And so it's good to just have that face-to-face conversation where we can talk about best practices. All right, so sighted stuff Brad, really appreciate you taking time to come out and speak with us. I guess just leave your audience with, how do they get involved? If they want to learn more, where do they reach? What websites do they go to? Share that. Yeah, vmug.com. That's the place to go. Our membership is free. Courage everybody to join up. And then on that website you can learn how to get plugged in on your local communities. And if you're not anywhere where there's local, we do have virtual events. We have weekly virtual events. And we also have two major full-day virtual events that people can participate in. And it's wonderful for them to be able to do that regardless of where you are. I want to thank you for having me, Stu and Brian, this has been fantastic. Very excited to be here today. And thank you for the time. All right, well Brad, thank you so much. I'll let you and Brian catch up on the football when we wrap up. Thanks North Carolina. Yeah, all things North Carolina. So thanks for watching. We'll be right back, lots more coverage here from VMworld 2015. This is theCUBE, thanks for watching.