On behalf of EMC Elect 2014 I’m able to provide three (3) discount codes for the upcoming EMC World 2014, in Las Vegas. Its worth is $150, so if you haven’t registered yet, contact me and I’ll help you getting this nice discount.
It’s that time again: 2013 has past and a lot of vendors have nominations running on who their most loyal “servants” were in the past year. All large vendors do this and even Cisco joined the ranks with their Cisco Champions appreciation program. Microsoft has its MVP, VMware is known for the vExperts and since last year EMC has their Elect group.
Compared to 2013 the group has grown a little bit from 75 to 80 members and the list consists of some great minds that you might have met over the past 12 months. Some of them are hyper active on Twitter, some on ECN, EMC’s own Community Network (the forums) and some (or most) simply write what’s on their minds on their blog websites.
Just like other big IT names like VMware with their vExpert, Microsoft with their MVP and since last year EMC with their Elect, now Cisco started their own community appreciation program called Cisco Champions. I want to focus on Data center Champions in particular since that’s the business I’m in myself. I’m not (much) into Cisco Data center networking technologies myself (yet), other than SAN related Fibre Channel equipment, but I’d like to dedicate this post to the start of this new community appreciation program nevertheless. The “community” is all that matters these days, right? Sharing knowledge to enhance the community “brain” as a whole. Being part of the 10 original founders of the EMC Elect I know how important proper communication can be for new programs like this and since Amy Lewis was kind enough to invite Allen Ward, Sergey Kamenetskiy and myself to shine in one of the “Engineers Unplugged” series in May 2013 in Las Vegas during EMC World, I thought, let’s return the favor and promote the Cisco Champions a bit, hoping for more collaboration and improvement of the awareness that even though social networking is some way of “virtual presence to people you might not even know”, if your network is large enough it can also be seen as your online think-tank.
It didn’t come as a surprise: after Microsoft MVP, VMware vExpert and the relative new EMC Elect program, Cisco just started another social champions program called “Cisco Champion for Datacenter”.
Who is that typical Cisco Champion? You’ve got to have passion and the desire to share your perspectives with the community. Cisco Champions are spread all over the world. Champions represent various segments across the whole IT industry and they spend their own private time to help others.
In addition to sharing their insights and expertise, Cisco Champions make a difference by:
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.
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