Welcome to the VMUG 2024 Call for Content!
Do you have a compelling story to share or expert tips and tricks you KNOW will help another IT professional? If so – we want you as a speaker for our VMUG 2024 Virtual & In-Person events and VMUG Collective in 2024! If you have attended our events in the past, you know that content is the cornerstone of the program, and strong industry speakers with a variety of experience make for a must-attend event!
Being a part of the leadership at VMUG events such as UserCons is a great way for VMware product experts, customers, business partners and VMUG community members, to contribute to the conversation with peers and colleagues.
We are actively seeking speaker proposals from VMware Product Experts, Business Partners, Customers, and VMUG community members on content across Anywhere Workspace, App Platform, Cloud & Edge Infrastructure, Cloud Management, Desktop Hypervisor, Professional Development and Security & Networking.
Here are some tips and guidelines to help you understand what we look for:
- Can facilitate hands on learning
- Provide a live, interactive demo
- Provide real-world comparisons
- Dive in-depth on a technical level
- Showcase how you can achieve more
- Have a great story to tell and a passion for sharing your knowledge with others (i.e. Customer Success Story – the VMUG community loves to hear about a customer’s journey, issues encountered, success achieved, etc.)
- Help solve common challenges
- Provide clear successful use cases, best practices, teachings and how-to’s
- Can go deep on how your company is using VMware products
- Highlight the ROI and additional benefits your company and team has seen since implementing VMware solutions
- Can highlight a tip, trick, or a specific feature and how you are using it
- Deliver cross-product solutions – using multiple products to solve your challenges
- Career thoughts & advice (IE: how can I get into a role where I can be more customer-facing?
- How can I be like those people I see on the stage?)
We are also implementing a new way to submit! Each speaker type should be submitting under their designated submission form – not sure where you fall? Please see the 2 types of submission forms below:
Customer Submission
A customer submission is any session presented by a VMware customer, that can advance an attendee’s experience in a variety of ways (technical knowledge, networking skills, professional development, etc.) A customer session is not focused on a product, but rather the user experience with products, and how the user can benefit from various technical skills and expertise. Customer sessions are also a great way to submit Professional Development topics, as those are focused entirely on customer experience.
VMUG will cover travel and expenses for all customer speakers.
VMware Submission
VMware Submissions are an opportunity to highlight VMware products and technology, provide expertise to members on how to best utilize these services, discuss any upgrades or new products, and share knowledge with members on VMware developments.
Submit below for:
Content Levels for 2024
Core
For traditional workloads and operations using hypervisors and virtual desktops, such as vSphere and Horizon.
Emerging
For professionals who have started their cloud journey and have adopted hyperconverged and ready for multi-cloud utilizing products such as vSAN/HCI, NSX, Workspace ONE or VMware Cloud Foundation.
Cutting-Edge
For professionals who have adopted DevOps and the newest technology such as Kubernetes and Tanzu, running on public or private clouds and are interested in learning what’s coming in the future such as AI/ML.
For VMware submitters: Please be sure to include your business unit & group on your submission form and please only submit sessions for cities you are confident you are able to attend or will have a resource available in your place.
Each session format can be addressed from several perspectives:
- Technology Focus – How does it work, how is the technology evolving, ripple effects on existing systems, networks and apps, etc.
- Business Case – Calculating ROI/TCO, business benefits/costs, impacts on user departments and individual users
- Case Study: Decision factors leading to deployment, results – planned/unplanned, lessons learned
- Impact on IT Organization – Decision-making, team building, and skill sets.
- Impact on IT-LOB Relationship – How does this change the decision-making and/or relationship(s)
Now that you have an idea of what we’re looking for, here are a few helpful tips for crafting your speaker submission so that you get selected to speak:
- Outline your talking points – think about why an attendee should give you their time
- List what problems you are solving
- List your top messages
- List your target personas and/or industries – who is the audience for your story?
- What is the take-away or action item the attendee walks away with?
- Including keyword tags in your title and/description will help users find your session
Submission Information
- Deadlines: Call for Content for consideration for first half of 2024 will open on Wednesday, October 18, 2023
- Final submissions will be accepted until end of day Friday, December 15, 2023
- Multiple Submissions: You may submit multiple proposals on different topics. Please note that submitting duplicate proposals will not increase your chance of having the proposal selected.
- Review Process: Once you submit, you will receive an email confirmation that your submission has been received. Our Content Review Committee will review each submission to help select the most relevant and intriguing content for our 2024 events.
- Acceptance Notice: If your submission is accepted, you will be notified by the VMUG Content Team for which event(s) VMUG would like you to present and we will provide information including requested deliverables (if any) and timelines for those events.
- Rejection Notice: If your submission is rejected, you will be notified by the VMUG Content Team mid-January 2024. You will be able to resubmit your session for the second half of the year beginning in May.
- Agenda Slotting: The VMUG Content Team select sessions based on the city they were submitted for. Please be sure you will be available for that city you are selecting on your submission form. We understand things come up, but please be sure you are not just selecting to select unless you are sure you will be available at the time of submission.
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