Last night I was honored to be part of the birthday extravaganza on the new-ish podcast Current Status. Last night’s podcast was a great celebration of how tech has changed since we were younger, and I talked about something for the first time in public. More on that later in the post, but first more about this podcast.

There are three hosts; two are technology customers and one works at a storage vendor. They bring in technical marketers and evangelists from other tech vendors, and ask them all the questions they have about their offerings. Since they are all very technical, they get in the weeds, and it’s great. Two of their previous podcasts that focused on Exchange (one of the hosts’ twitter handle is @exchangegoddess, so that’s understandable) had some very good low-level info I had been looking for when I was working on AppAssure. If you are a vendor looking for customer perspective, you need to check out this podcast.

Check out the entire playlist here. The next episode is focused on VDI using Citrix XenDesktop as a virtualization platform (on March 12).

Ok back to me. 🙂 Here is the news I shared on the podcast: I’m no longer with Dell. It was a great run, and I learned a lot, in particular about B2B marketing. I tried to take a bit of time off, but honestly I’ve been busier this last couple of weeks than I have been in a while. I believe our industry is getting ready for a couple of very big pivots, and vendors seem to be ramping up for the change! I’m having great conversations with several folks, but would love to talk to you if you need help with engaging your customers or the audience to which you are marketing. My email is gminks at gmail.

I’m humbled that so many people have already reached out to me with very interesting projects. I’ve been a part of this enterprise community for about 13 years, and have been writing about it for the past 5 or six years. My motto is “think big, think different, connect all”. I had no idea the meaning some of the connections I’ve made would hold for me, and y’all I really appreciate it…..more than I can express.

Y’all, we do not have to do marketing the same way it’s been done since marketing began. Ditto for education, ditto for implementing the constructs that hold the data we manage and protect. We can do it differently, and we may need to think big to get those changes implemented. And we definitely cannot do it alone. I’m not the first one to write on these concepts, and I won’t be the last. We need to embrace our past, so we can learn from it. We  need to welcome and support the new ways of doing things, like the Current Status podcast, so we can be energized by new possibilities.

So thanks ladies for including me last night. Thanks to the community for staying connected and sharing with me. I know in the past there has been talk about a vendor agnostic community that binds us together as a guild. As we get ready for these big pivots in our industry, and we see more and more hype thrown out there about the tech behind the pivots, maybe it’s time to start talking about that idea again. What do y’all think?