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Posts Tagged ‘award’

VMware announced this week that nominations for 2010 vExpert are being accepted until April 30, 2010. Be sure to vote for your favorite “bloggers, book authors, VMUG leaders, event organizers, speakers, tool builders, forum leaders, and others who share their virtualization expertise” by filling out the official application found at the new vExpert 2010 Landing site.

For those who do not know, the vExpert Award was introduced by VMware in 2009. Best described as an award similar to Microsoft’s MVP, I was lucky enough to be named one of the 300 vExperts awarded last year. Check out my acceptance speech post from last February. All joking aside, the award distinguishes those “who have significantly contributed to the community of VMware users over the past year.”

The application process is not a contest or an election campaign, so if you have a candidate that may not be as well known in the vEcosphere already but has significantly contributed to the VMware and virtualization community be sure to fill out an application for him/her. All it takes is one application to recognize someone for their efforts in 2009!

If you follow virtualization bloggers and experts on Twitter or if you regularly check sites like Planet V12n, you’ve no doubt heard that VMware is announcing a new award for key virtualization community contributors. Some speculated the recognition would be modeled after a successful program like Microsoft’s MVP with perhaps a similar title such as VVP for Valuable VMware Professionals. Well, John Troyer has officially announced the new program tonight with his VMTN Blog post Are you a VMware vExpert? Announcing a new community award.

John explains:

“VMware is very proud to introduce the VMware vExpert Awards. The VMware vExpert Awards will be given to individuals who have significantly contributed to the overall community of VMware users over the past year, either online or offline. You might be contributing online to blogs, forums, wikis, or other online sites. You might be organizing VMUG meetings or otherwise getting the word out to local IT professionals. You’re helping spread the word about virtualization and making people successful in deploying this game-changing technology. [omitted]

Here is the nomination form. You can nominate yourself or someone else. We’re also taking nominations from people and programs within VMware, so you actually don’t even have to nominate yourself and you still could wake up one day with an award. [omitted]

Awardees will get an award certificate and a little gift, but the real award is being able to call yourself a VMware vExpert for the year, getting listed in a public directory, and getting access to our private community. The vExpert award is not any sort of technical certification like VCP, and in fact vExpert isn’t really about your raw technical expertise at all. However, the people who get this kind of award tend to both (1) display a lot of technical expertise as they help others; and (2) work their tails off in the community on top of their day jobs.”

So, here’s your chance to say thanks to those guys that wrote that script that saved you so much time deploying or troubleshooting your VI, or published that “how to” that gave you the missing piece of a configuration you just couldn’t get to work right, or answered your questions quickly on the VMware forums, or even organized a VMware User Group in your area. Say thanks to those that keep you informed on the new products and technologies in the always changing world of virtualization.

There are so many individuals that deserve this award I imagine the VMware committee that has to choose who the 2008 vExperts are will have a very tough time deciding.