Power of Community: Virtualization Reality–Sydney

One of the challenges we face as IT folk is taking the time to work on our professional networking skills at in-person events. I mean seriously – we’ve worked all day, solved peoples problems and kept servers and systems running. At the end of the day – we mostly just want to go home. IT Folks are few and far between that want to take the time OUT of their personal lives outside of working hours in order to get together and talk about technology.

The concept of The Virtualization Reality community tour was to go out to established groups of like minded Technical Professionals and give them the straight goods on what the Microsoft Virtualization stack can do. Whenever we ask groups what we can do so support them – the answer is always – “get us speakers and content for my group”. From the beginning with this tour – I mentioned that we would not be restrictive on where we go – so long as there was a local champion to help out. We had to make the investment and go to locations that we haven’t been before – to show support of the efforts the local community members. 

For the Eastern leg of this tour – I’m in Sydney Nova Scotia right now (can you tell) – the day after the event before I drive down to Halifax to continue the tour. I mentioned the intent to support established groups – but what about areas where there are currently NO GROUPS to speak of? We don’t come out much this way – so much so that we actually made the business section of the paper over the weekend with an article that “Microsoft was Coming to Town”. The driving force for coming out was the passion of a couple of guys from a local Professional Services company here in Sydney called AG Research. 

That’s Joe on the left, Darryl on the Right – met them both a couple of years back at TechDays Halifax. They told me at the time “Come on up to Sydney – the weather is great and there are lots of IT folks out this way who would love to see ya”. So when Darryl contacted me to say he’d sign up to host an event, how could I refuse.

Kudos to Darryl and Joe for pulling this off! Also – an awesome show of support from their company AG Research for both giving them the opportunity to host this and put on an event for the local IT Community AND driving awareness with their customers. Weather has been great (reminds me of a beautiful Summertime day in my hometown of Saint John, NB) for my drive up from Halifax.
Over 30 people showed up last night with lots of questions and interest to learn about the Microsoft Virtualization stack.

The real value is hopefully going to continue – I encourage everyone to keep in touch and establish a group that regularly gets together and supports each other in the local community. I’ll do my best to come out again.