I think Stephen Foskett said it best in this post: “We are social people, and nothing beats meeting someone face to face.”
Last week, Interop and EMC World were held in Vegas. (You can check out my review of Interop in this post). That meant a lot of storage people where in sin city at the same time – vendors, customers, analysts… all converged in the same meat space at the same time. Part of the anticipation of these events is not just coming to talk to customers in the booth, or to present or listen to interesting sessions. Its knowing we’ll meet our online friends for the first time.
Many of us are already connected via social media. We chat on Twitter, we read and comment on each other’s blogs. I love meeting people face to face that I’ve been interacting with for months or years, because we already know each other. We don’t have to do that awkward dance, we can just talk, interact as storage colleagues.
I can’t wait to meet some of the folks that have been interacting with the Dell Storage, EqualLogic, Compellent, and Dell Storage Forum twitter accounts (and Facebook pages!) at the Dell Storage Forum in Orlando in LESS THAN THREE WEEKS! We have some awesome things in store to help facilitate the strengthening of our community since we’ll all be together in the sunshine state for several days….more on that very very soon. 🙂 And if you are connected to us – what are you waiting for!?!
Even better is when the small worlds I live in online start to blend with my not online life. For instance, I was able to introduce my new Dell colleagues to my old EMC colleagues in Vegas at #cxiparty and #storagebeers. I found out an old EMC colleague who is at Joyent now is working with people I know from #bitnorth. I can’t even count the connections with folks from other vendors like VMware. Intermingling all these people into one big community of storage practice is seriously amazing.
Since a picture is worth a thousand words, let me share some great photos taken by Stephen Foskett at #storagebeers. You can check out his full Interop Flickr set here.
Looking forward to making more of these connections in Orlando in June — hope to see you there!
Here is one of my pictures:
