I’ve been so very fortunate since joining the non-vendor side of pre-sales. Seems that just doing that has been quite a boon to my career. I love what I do. I love blogging about technology, joining @RayLucchesi and @CTOAdvisor as an occasional guest-host on the #GBOS Greybeards on Storage podcast. I really enjoy talking about technology with customers, and vendors. But by far one of the most valuable pieces of my personal equation has been becoming a delegate to Tech Field Day. As of now, I’ve attended 16 events as a delegate.

Personally, I’ve loved joining in with a wonderfully diverse group of geeks, propeller heads, and nerds as we discuss the great technologies we’ve seen, and a wide variety of other geeky things. I have gained life-long friendships with peers around the globe, learned enormous amounts of things about a huge variety of people, places, and technologies. As is my focus, I tend toward the storage end of enterprise tech, but I’ve been fortunate enough to be included in cloud, virtualization, and some of the enabling hardware and software in which storage plays a part as well. I can easily say that Tech Field day has been some of the most fun I have in my year, which is not to under-emphasize how much it’s enabled me to get better at my job.

Through this remarkable organization, I’ve become familiar with some very interesting technology vendors as well. Both the old stalwarts, and some very cool startups. By all means, learning about these companies has given me broader strokes with which to approach my customers, and allowing me to give them the scope of options when they choose to pursue something both tried-and-true, as well as cutting-edge. This has been a fantastic opportunity for me.

This month, #TFD becomes 10 years old. Their unique model of melding this kind of diverse scope of vendors with an equally diverse group of bloggers has given #TFD a readership, viewership, and a following rivaling and surpassing the loyalties of practically any group in technology.

Potential customers can join in via the twitter feed, or video streams as these happen, ask questions pertinent to them, or hopefully we delegates can proxy for the customer and ask questions in anticipation of their needs. We, as delegates, have the responsibility to help to draw out the vendor for interesting and salient points that could help these customers in their journey to modernize or expand their datacenter footprints.

The good folks at #GestaltIT and #TechFieldDay consistently organize valuable offerings to get the vendor in front of their buyers so that the messaging gets clarified, and made relevant. The vendors (Storage, Cloud, Networking, Wireless, and other enterprise technologies) are granted a platform of opportunity to put their best face on their developments or new products, and we, the bloggers and influencers get more content to write. They’ve created this ultimate win-win situation.

I am grateful to Stephen (@SFoskett), Claire (@CChaplais), Ben (@BenTGage), Mel (@ZuraMel), Rich (@MrAnthropology), Tom (@NetworkingNerd), and all those who’ve passed through the Ohio based offices through these past 10 years, and look forward to many great experiences to come.