 Hey everybody, this is Christian Buckley. I'm doing another MVP buzz chat. I'm talking today with Vim. Hello. Hello, Christian. Finally we meet. Finally. I know we've been rescheduling this over and over again for literally like three and a half, four months now. Yeah, I think it's something like that, yeah. For folks that don't know you, who are you, where are you, and what do you do? So I'm Vim Matheson. I will pronounce my back name. Like I would say it in Dutch. I live in Belgium. I started in IT, I think around 2002, just as a technical engineer, helping people with all kinds of issues going from printers to servers and so on. And then started working with servers, Hyper-V. Everybody in Belgium was working with VMware, but for some reason I ended up at a customer focusing on Hyper-V. Even started off with virtual server, went to Hyper-V and so on. System center, the whole system center, sorry, added. And then I came in contact with some people of the Belgium system center user group. And that's how I started off with community. First, simply writing blocks, issues, day-to-day issues, and how I solve them. Also focusing on Hyper-V and those things. And I think around 2014 I made the switch to the cloud. So Azure, that's also the early beginning. First phases of Azure were almost in Belgium. Nobody was using it, only specific customers. And since then I'm almost purely focusing on Azure and then I must say the hybrid cloud these days. So the complete arc story with that, we're seeing quite an adoption of that also in Belgium these days in the Netherlands. So in a way, I went from on-premises to the cloud and now I'm somewhere in the middle. Using those things from before, yeah. It's so funny about this space too is that, so I went to join a startup in early 2001 where we built a dedicated cloud platform. And that was like at the beginning of when SaaS as an acronym was created. And then to hear like, so Microsoft president of collaborative apps and solutions is, Jeff Teeper talked about like he feels like it wasn't until like 2015, 2016 where really there was the broad acceptance. We finally crossed that threshold into the cloud. And I sat there talking to him, I interviewed him in Amsterdam at the end of November. And it was just thinking about that like, wow, that was so for me it was 15 years of trying to convince people, you know, this is- These days I'm still convincing people because I see the Netherlands is quite fast with their cloud adoption and Azure and that's being used there quite a lot. But in Belgium, we're always a little bit much slower in adopting new stuff. Yeah, you know what? Everybody says that though, that's true. I mean, in every region, I mean, I know that there's, I mean, there's other issues too. Like, you know, Americans will go and build out some technology and throw it out there and be like, did anybody look at governance? Anybody look at security? It's like, oh, yeah, well- And then they all go back. That's right. That next generation. Sometimes it's strange. I think I'm already doing these things from 2014 and you're starting now with the adoption with 2024. So it's 10 years later and I'm already doing those things for 10 years and you're just starting with EOS for example. I think which thing where you're missing in between in those 10 years that you just start adoption, you're just moving your own premiums to Azure. And I think, yeah, but we are already 50 steps ahead now. So what do you think, why are some people, why are some organizations so slow? I mean, so like I always, I would always say coming from the project and portfolio management side of things. And one of the reasons why it took a long time for many of those organizations because they invested so heavily, they're like, we're not gonna even look at spending new money until we've gotten the value out of what we've already purchased. And so that's one reason. It's just a licensed thing. We just bought this for three years. We're still going to use it. We have, for example, new family license whatsoever. It doesn't matter. Okay, we have for three years, five year Citrix licenses. We're just going to use it. And even the first three years don't look at anything else. Right. But they don't think future-wise. And sometimes the thing I see, if people, especially the technical people are familiar with something, hey, they managed something for five, six years. For them, okay, I'm getting older. I'm at 20 years from my retirement. Yeah, I'm not going to change my complete way of working because somebody invented cloud or they advise us to use cloud because it's a skill set they have, but they also need to switch the way of thinking, the way of deploying things, the way it's a process. And some people, I think are easy with that. Also, if the company uses it and the company supports all the stuff and gives you their trainings and so on and so on. But sometimes it's still people, but it works. I don't touch it. Well, then you get into conversations, right? This is funny. I mean, there's a huge focus when I got my MBA was around the opportunity cost. What does it cost you? One, there's the initial investment. Yeah, you might have two years left on the licenses that you have, but what is the value of the features and the capability of the speed or the lack thereof? What is that cost? And at some point- Did they even add new things? Right. It's not because you bought that license or you use it for five years. Did they add something that brought you some more capabilities, some more features you were waiting on or just using the same thing once over again for the next five years? Yeah. So the innovation part is also quite important, I think. And the vision of the company and then where do we want to get and how many people can we support and so on and so on. So I guess what we're saying here is that I feel your pain of what you still have to go through. And it's basically we're having to go and make the same points. I just was having a conversation with this morning about somebody that had concerns about security in the cloud. And I'm sure you have that discussion all the time. Like you're on-prem, what you're doing, you have the utmost, you feel that that is secure, that it's hardened, that you're managing it all yourself. If your security person is sick or is injured, it is missing work, like what happens to your environment, your level of trust? Yeah. Sometimes because they see the boxes in their data center or they see the cables running underneath the floor. Okay, now I'm safe because I see everything. But when I'm going into the cloud, I don't see anything around it. I just see my thing and yeah, what are they doing around it? I don't know, I don't think. And for some people, it still seems like, yeah, lack on security or don't trust it because it's just not visible like they opened their door. And okay, my five servers are in my closet. Okay, I'm safe. Yeah. Well, the other thing that opens up to is that shadow IT is because you have these that, we're all technologists at some level. I mean, people are, information workers, they may not be in touching the servers, but they can certainly understand the advances in the capabilities of the various solutions that are out there. And so when the IT organization, the company says no, because we've got two more years on these licenses. They find a workaround to get their job done in the way they want to do it. Which I'm sure is completely secure. And yeah, I know 15 years ago, nobody was doing IT and it was purely for people really doing it as their job. Even now, everybody at my house can plug in a PC, plug in the printer and get it fixed. Years ago, you had to solve the printer problem. Those things, everybody can do those things. Everybody can plug in a Wi-Fi router. And yeah, okay, I can get online. I fix my own stuff. If it doesn't work that way, I will find another way to get it working. I'm always amazed at how much, when there's a technical question of something who just bought some expensive camera equipment and my wife who's more of the photographer and she's able to get, I'm trying to figure it out and I just go into YouTube. Yeah, that's the thing. Yeah, just go and completely walk through. Right. Figure it out, read a blog post whatsoever and everybody can read, I think. So they try it out and if it's not working, they look at something differently. And yeah, that's a big difference between when I was started up with managing services in a big environment, I had to figure out everything myself. Nobody teached me, I need to look out, yeah, test some things, fall back, ask questions to more senior people maybe, but I didn't go on the internet and tak, tak, tak, and looked it up. It wasn't there. So for troubleshooting skillsets, that's something I see missing with the younger people these days. Yeah, if they can't find it on YouTube, if they can't find it through Google, chat GTP these days, they don't get it fixed. But it's not because an AI is saying what you need to do that you in the back know what you're doing. That's something. But see, we're getting very close to where we'll get back to having like the Google glasses. We'll have the headset. My car breaks down the side of the road. I'll be able to open it up, call my mechanic right from there. He'll be able to do the augmented reality and see, hey, check this. Oh, I can see something as a miss. He'll be tied in. If you know what you're doing, it's your day-to-day job and you're completely familiar with Azure or your own premise environment, doesn't matter. And then you look something up through those things and that's saying you need to do this, that's this step seven, eight, and you see something is wrong. You will know if something is wrong. If you've never done it before on your own, you're just going click, click, or whatsoever, and you go through it and then yeah, maybe it's even worse click or figure than it was before. Well, that's one of the, one of the lessons need to teach to the younger generation is to understand the power of community. Like you talked about, like you coming up, like I don't know the answer to every question, but I'm pretty confident. I know somebody who knows the answer to that. Most of the time, if I don't know the question, I just ask somebody. Right, yeah. In Belgium, yeah, we all, with some other people, I also have a Microsoft Cloud and client management community, MC2MC, and where we focus on three pillars. So we have people, skill in Azure, everything, Windows servers, Arc, AVD, we have the second pillar is endpoint and security. So we have quite a lot of people in our community focusing on purely endpoint, in-tune, Microsoft 365 defender and those things. And now we even have added the third pillar where everybody's focusing on, yeah, it's also quite a buzzword these days, data, AI, and the power automate and power platform. So if I have a customer problem, normally they come to me to Azure, but most of the time they ask, yeah, do you know somebody that knows this because you have a broad network and you almost know everybody? Yeah, I can ping somebody, but yeah, he probably can help you fix your problem. That's how I mostly get something fixed. I don't know. Right, probably, except in the realm of AI where there's a whole lot of people talking and nobody, we all have the same amount of experience. Yeah, it's all new for everybody. I was gonna ask those like, so when you kind of going back to your roots and becoming an MVP and you talked about getting plugged in to the user group there, like, so how did you get involved? Because a lot of people struggle with that. Like, well, do I just go and raise my hand and say, hey, I'd like to get more involved? I always tell people, yes, do that. In some way you can. Yeah. For me, it was somebody also working at the same customer I was working on. He was doing Scone, for example, and he invited me. Yeah, you do Hyper-V, you do the system center virtual machine manager, nobody in Belgium is almost talking about it. Won't you be interested to write a block? Okay, writing a blog. I will do a start writing a blog. Yeah, we have the platform. You just need to write the blog post and you can add it to our platform and just focus on those things. And that's how I started off. And then from that, it started with, do you want to do a public presentation? For public, I need to talk for people and explain my, yeah, just talk about what you're writing and show your experience and just go ahead. And yeah, with that, yeah. For me, now talking is like having fun. I'm even not stressed anymore or whatsoever. Just go with the flow and yeah. So have you ever had somebody in your audience that you've presented to that has just ripped you to pieces in what you're presenting about? Have you had that experience? No, not really, to be honest. Not that I saw people doing it to other speakers. And I always think, wait a minute, you're in front of all those people. Yeah, well, it's, I always like to ask because again, I've witnessed some of that. I've had a couple of experiences which I think I handle it pretty well. And one of the things I always, which is a great thing to have is a bit of humility and somebody asked a question and said, you know, I have no idea. Like I'm like, you can talk about it after our session, let me look into it. Let me go get back to you or whatsoever. But it really depends of the audience most of the time, I think, and where you're talking. If we're a user group, it's easier to communicate but most people coming to those user group evening events know each other. So it's in a more polite way. If you're at a big event and somebody raises hand just because he wants to make a point, that's, yeah. There's, well, there's certainly an art to that, especially I've been in where there's been people in the audience that have just completely the phrase that we use here, railroaded, you know, the conversation, taking it over and the speakers were not very good at, well, how do I- I'm thinking of myself and answering- How do I pull it back in and move on? There's some- No, I'm quite directing that way. I'm trying to, yeah, I know we're getting there. We're over here and we're getting there. Sometimes people interrupt, yeah, and this and this and this. Yes, okay, but we're just stalking our story. Let us, in the end, between the middle, we're getting there, we'll explain how we see it. Sometimes people are also 50 miles ahead, but yeah. You need to think, not everybody in the audience most of the time has the same experience. Yeah. I do a lot of do-it-talks with Micha and we always try to explain the things we're talking about, the easiest way, so people just using it, don't knowing it, can follow, but also the experienced people, if they wait a little bit, we always try to, yeah. Yeah, well, you need to- Well, there's somebody, I've forgotten the reference. It's been so long, but, you know, one of the, it's a skill in presenting to, at the beginning, tell people what you're going to present to them, go through the presentation, at the end, summarize what you've presented to them, so that they understand what was covered, what is not gonna be covered, and that's why smaller groups, I always, I love having a whiteboard or something where the questions we get, call it parking lot or whatever, take it offline later, but, you know, hey, these questions that we did not cover, come back to me, or let's talk after my session. I also give trainings and that makes it easier if you need to do an hour session, it's easier to fit everything in between because you're used to talking about something for hours and hours and hours and explain it from A to Z, but sometimes you need to fit it in 50 minutes or 60 minutes, and it's, after doing it, more and more, you get more familiar with it, how to handle it, how to build up maybe your slides, do we do a lot of slides, do more demo and talk through the demos, and it depends, it also depends on the audience most of the time. I always love doing, you know, the user groups and it's certainly at community-driven events, like we're getting ready to do our collab days Utah event in April, and we're wrapping up the entire, with an hour of the Ask the Experts, one of my favorite segments, where you, all the speakers that are still there, some have to leave a little early, but you put them all on stage and just let the audience ask questions, do an AMAs and ask the experts to do AMAs, folks that don't ask me anything, those formats are sometimes the most rewarding, and I, because I learn a lot too, I sit with all these other experts and somebody's bound to know they- We organize quite a lot of evening events and every time I learn something. Yeah. For some reason, even if I'm working with those things, everybody has another point of view, looks at things in another way, maybe they're doing it this way, that way, maybe it's a better way than how you've done it for the last two months or whatsoever. Yeah, I think you can learn, you can always learn something from somebody. Well, so final question for you, I always like to ask a version of this, but so I'm sure you've had, you've been an MVP for four years, four and a half years now? Yeah, four years, yeah. So you've got people coming up and asking like, well, how do I become an MVP? Like, what's your advice? What's your guidance to people of what to do? My thing was, I love the community, I love sharing, just start up with blogging about something you love to do, build it up, talk about things you love to do, not everybody loves to be in front of a public, maybe you can make YouTube videos, there are different ways, but there's no, in my opinion, just do the things you love and probably if people like it, it will be picked up. There's no direct way to get, okay, I started blogging and I'm now an MVP and I get a lot of those questions from people and I say, I just love the things I'm doing, I'm not doing it to become an MVP. Right. I like writing blogs, I like organizing those evening events, I like to talk to people in a public event and just sometimes my thought is not, for me, love what you do, share what you do and maybe you will get there, otherwise you don't get there and then, yeah. But even if you don't, you're doing what you love and you're helping the community and you're gonna get value out of it, you're gonna get benefits from that, helping other people, I call it karma, whatever you want to call it, there's value. If you help people, people will also help you when you have a question. That's why I mostly see it. I just share what I'm doing and how I fix things but I even also read other blog posts, look at videos from other people that solve a problem I come up for and I don't know how to solve it and yeah, it's just sharing, sharing and caring and yeah. Yep, 100%. Well, Wyn, really appreciate your time, getting to know you and I'm glad we were finally able to connect. Are you coming over for the MVP Summit? We'll try if I can fix my plane in a hotel because it's easier if you live in the US, I think. Yeah, it is. So next week I will be at the MCT Summit, that's not that far from me but normally I subscribe to go to the MVP Summit but I still need to figure it out with my company I'm working for, if I can, yeah. Yeah, because it's quite a huge amount of money. It is, I know. You pay it for yourself, so we'll see, hopefully we get there. Yeah, well, for folks that wanna reach out to you, connect with you, where are you most active in social, where can people find you? I'm still on X, I started off with Twitter, I'm still there. So if you look me up at Vema Passant, you will probably figure it out. I have my own blog, VemaPassant.com. Also quite whenever I do something blogs, I also post it on LinkedIn. So you can find me on LinkedIn X, you can find me on the MC2MC website from my user group. So different ways to find me and if you have a question related to something I'm focusing on, just ask and if I can help, I would probably help you. Excellent, and of course I'll have all the links that are out on the blog post, that are out on YouTube and out in the podcast as well. So thank you so much for your time and we'll talk soon. Yep, bye bye. Wow.