SNUG, then VMUG

I completed a user group duathlon yesterday: the ServiceNow Users Group and the DC VMware Users Group. I totally lucked out, since both events were in McLean, VA. Here's a bit of what I learned from each.

SNUG

I like ServiceNow more and more these days. In the past, I would have discarded ServiceNow as ticketing software. That'd be like saying VMware is just a x86 virt platform. Yesterday's SNUG had a great presentation on the strategic direction of the company, as imagined by Dave Wright, ServiceNow's Chief Strategy Officer. He talked about the evolution from Help Desk to Service Relationship Management, and how IT can mature from a provider of technologies to a provider of services. He also explained the four pillars of SRM:

1. Service Experience
2. Record Keeping
3. Process Automation
4. Business Management

If you want to see a presentation similar to the one given at SNUG, click here.

It turns out that Dave Wright was the Vice President of Technical Services, EMEA for VMware for six years. Which made for a great segue as I ducked out a few minutes early to avoid introducing myself to the group to get to the DCVMUG in time.

VMUG

VMUGs are always great. You get to chat with bright people with a variety of backgrounds in virtualization technologies. We listened as Brad Clemmons (a VMware staff engineer) talk about VMware's roadmap for the SDDC, which is starting to fill out now with the introduction of VSAN and NSX. And we learned that the rumors of vCD's demise are mostly untrue. While much of its functionality is being split into vCAC and vCenter, vCD will persist as a product geared to Service Providers.

Nexenta presented their SDS offerings, specifically for VDI. Their interface for provisioning storage as part of deploying virtual desktops was pretty slick. It was a great, tangible example of what SDS can look like.

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As always, I highly recommend attending these community-building events, no matter what your technical or business interests may be.