Check out the announcement here.

The above link from the fine folks at VMware’s @vCommunityGuy Corey Romero denoted the listing for the inaugural class of vExperts on the new Cloud award. I’m honored to have been included among the influencers that were announced under the listing. Having been recognized by the social media and communities group for the conversations, blogging, tweeting and evangelizing of this maturing technology by VMware in the cloud realm is indeed a big thrill.

Along with having been a vExpert for the past 7 years, and getting included amongst some of the amazing peers in the space, I’ve also been recognized for the vExpert NSX category for a couple years running as well.

It’s been an awesome career up until this point. Back when I joined EMC after having spent the preceding years of my career responsible for one of the largest VMware environments in the world, I had been given the sage advice from my boss, @Sakacc, Chad Sakac to both begin blogging and to get myself on Twitter. I took those words to heart. I’ve embraced the social media aspects of my role as a presales architect quite aggressively. I recognized that to evangelize the products I love, the philosophies toward which I approach my role, and most recently the channel, which is truly where I’m making my home.

Being in the channel is a real blessing for my approach in the role. Advocacy is an enormous part of what I bring to the role. I believe that to assist my customers in choosing the best approach toward their business and technical needs requires a full knowledge of the overall ecosystem of products. How do these tools interact, not just with each other, but with the current and future needs of my customer? How tightly aligned are they to the needs my customers have expressed? How deeply have I researched the needs of my customer? Have I asked all the right questions, in an effort to ensure that I qualify the solutions I represent? And then, have I communicated well enough why I feel that this approach is ideal for them?

My success in my role demands that I take these aspects as seriously as if I were to be making the decisions for my own company. My integrity in this approach demands that I don’t allow my decisions to be swayed by such irrelevancies as product spiffs, and gross profit. All that matters is that my customers get the most ideal solution for their needs.

VMware has proven throughout the years, to be core to the solution set. Such tools as NSX, vSAN, VXRail, as well as the hypervisor cannot be denied as central to the needs of enterprise customers today. Should these solutions hope to extend the on-premises data center virtualization platform toward a cloud based or cloud-extended solution, the progress at VMware beyond the growth of the API solutions and into fully integrated VSphere with Amazon Web Services, and beyond, the VMware solutions we’ve seen out of the engineering crew from VMware are enabling all these tools, including visualization, orchestration, and management.

My career owes debts of gratitude to the Tech Field Day crew and Stephen Foskett (@SFoskett), Calvin Zito (@CalvinZito), John Troyer (@Jtroyer), Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor), and others who’ve given me opportunites to meet with amazing vendors and partners, interviewed me on their respective podcasts, and allowed me to be included in these conversations, to learn and grow in my career, and to allow me to become the architect I am, and to become the architect I’d like to be.

It is truly an honor to be recognized, alongside such great other vExperts noticed in the crew listed. Again, I wish to thank VMware for this recognition, and look forward to the growth of the product stream as it matures. Thank you