So Long, Status Quo (Again)

A little over two years ago, I wrote a blog post titled “So Long Status Quo.” (The title is taken from the Nichole Nordeman song “Brave”, in case you didn’t catch the reference.) At the time, I was making a pretty big move in my life, moving from a career in the VAR/reseller space—where I’d been for over a decade—into a job working for EMC Corporation on the vSpecialist (aka the VMware Affinity) team.

The last couple of years have been a whirlwind of change, a fitting culmination to a period of my life that started way back in the early 2000′s when I first installed VMware Workstation and started down a path dominated by VMware’s virtualization solutions. Since starting down that path with VMware, a lot of “milestones” have been achieved:

• This web site really took off during VMworld 2007 in San Francisco, where I liveblogged like a madman.
• At VMworld 2009, I spoke for the first time and released my first book, Mastering VMware vSphere 4.
• My second book (with Jase McCarty and Matthew Johnson), VMware vSphere 4 Administration Instant Reference, was released later in 2009.
• In early 2010 I achieved the status of VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX).
• In 2010, I had the privilege of being a co-author on VMware vSphere Design, with Forbes Guthrie and Maish Saidel-Keesing.
• In 2010, I also spoke at VMworld again. Unfortunately, I didn’t do a very good job that year, but I did learn some important lessons—from that perspective, it was useful.
• I spoke again at VMworld 2011, leveraging the lessons learned from the previous year, and managed to end up with one of the 5 most highly-rated sessions at VMworld US.
• Between VMworld US and VMworld EMEA 2011, I released my fourth book, Mastering VMware vSphere 5, and managed—just barely—to actually get some books to Copenhagen for VMworld EMEA.
• This year, I produced my first Train Signal video training course, titled Designing VMware Infrastructure.

Most importantly, I’ve had the opportunity to meet a lot of great people, and I’ve been told that my talks, my writing, my website, and my books have been genuinely helpful. To me, that’s been the best part of this journey with VMware—knowing that I’ve been able to help other people in some small way.

Now, two years after my last “So Long, Status Quo” post, I am preparing to enter another period of great change. It is not without some sense of trepidation, much like so many years ago when I first started focusing on VMware. The phrase, “So long, status quo” is as relevant to me today as it was then. Very soon, I’ll transition into a new role at EMC. I’m leaving the vSpecialist team to join a small team called the Solutions Innovation Group, where I’ll be helping to create new solutions built with emerging technologies and partners. That, by itself, is not that big of a change—a new manager and a new job role with a new job description, but not a major change. The major change is that, in this new role, VMware will no longer be my primary focus. I’ll still be working with VMware, but it won’t be the central focus. My new role necessitates that I will be working extensively with OpenStack and CloudStack as well as VMware’s products.

It’s a brave new world, that’s for sure. Trust that I’ll continue to share lots of solid technical content here, although it might be a bit less VMware-centric moving forward. I’ll be learning lots of new products and technologies, and you can almost bet the learning process will generate quite a fair amount of new content. I hope as I continue on my own journey of personal and professional growth that the information I share here will be as useful and helpful to others as it has been in the past.

So long, status quo (again)…