History in the making
Last year around this time EMC worked with the 10 Elect founders (including me) to get blog posts, tweets and Facebook messages out into the world to get people to nominate people who they found deserved it to be member of the so-called EMC Elect 2013. In the storage world nobody heard of this initiative yet and it was a 0 – 100 cold start which took a huge amount of effort to gain momentum, but I think we did well and the momentum is there! Even after the initial 75 Elect members were known in January, every single one of them promoted this program to friends, family, colleagues and even EMC people to make sure that the next round was going to be a running start instead of a cold one.
EMC World
Together with Open Line colleagues and fellow Elect 2013 members Jon Klaus and Menno de Liège I visited EMC World in Las Vegas and promoted the EMC Elect wherever we went. And it didn’t stop there. Every opportunity we got we actually used to talk about Elect and the importance of such a program. Being part of this great group meant that we were treated with an exclusive visit to the SuperNAP 7 data center facility in Las Vegas, which was – as somebody called it – feeling like we were walking inside the real internet. But also we got some great exclusive discussions with the ViPR product team.
Elect everywhere
After the yearly EMC World event in May the Elect showed up at lots of other events, ranging from the VMworld events in San Francisco and Barcelona, Oracle Open World in San Francisco, the EMC Forums in lots of cities all over the world (which are still going on), the Mega Launch Midrange in Milan (I found myself talking to Rich Napolitano and Denis Vilfort) and the Cisco Live events all over the world. It’s safe to assume that more people now know what this to called EMC Elect is (and hopefully who their members are).
Elect 2014
But every good thing must come to an end and make place for something new. No, the Elect is not going anywhere!!! Not at all! But it’s time for a refresh and the 2013 members are now almost “alumni” and will need to be replaced or prolonged. And so it’s time to finalize the nomination round that has been open since May. A little less than 4 weeks to go and the names will be known to the new judges. I can assure them that it’s going to be a lot of work and as somebody said: the founders (former judges) are off the hook. November 15 is the closing day for the nominations and after that the fun starts for a number of people who will be facing the task of impersonating Sherlock Holmes in order to make sure that the new nominees are rated correctly. I don’t envy them, but I’m sure they will do a great job.
Did you know…?
Wanna know more about the Elect? Did you know there’s an RSS feed? Subscribe to it and never miss a blog post from them again: EMC Elect RSS Feed! What are the advantages of being EMC Elect? Elect get early access to product information, special blogger briefings, dinner parties all over the world and access to special events like I mentioned earlier. And to quote Jon Klaus: “let’s be honest: it’s flattering to wear the EMC Elect badge and be part of a very small, very active and talented group of professionals.” Yes, it’s flattering indeed!!
Call for action
What else needs to be done now? As I just explained, the Elect are still there and a refresh is needed. If you haven’t done so already, please nominate your favorite “community hero” using this form. Make sure to fill out this form before November 15 and don’t forget that even self-nomination is (still) valid and also that nominating more than 1 person is allowed as well!! Make sure that as much people are nominated to be included in the EMC Elect 2014!! The judging starts November 15 and the class of 2014 will be announced on January 15, 2014.
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