This is a guest blog from our business partners at Envision Technology Advisors inviting you to VMworld By Proxy.

Every year, Envision Technology Advisors holds an educational day-long conference focused on the latest advances and technologies in cloud computing, virtualization, and business IT. Known as “VMworld By Proxy”, this free event, which is now in its 5th year, is attended by some of the largest and most successful companies throughout New England.

Why did we begin offering this event and why do we keep doing it each year? Because not everyone can make it out to conferences like VMworld or Dreamforce – and even for those that do, there is much value in an event that strips away the marketing and sales aspects of the presentation and instead focuses on an educational, best-in-class approach to emerging technologies and solutions. This is VMworld By Proxy.

Our First VMworld

Envision attended our first VMworld in 2005. It was the second year that VMware held the virtualization-specific conference, but already the buzz on this event was building. Attendance numbers doubled from the first year of the conference to the second year as IT professionals from across the globe took notice and began to incorporate a trip to VMworld into their yearly planning.

Envision was one of the companies that immediately saw the importance and value of this event. We have been a part of VMworld every year since 2005, sending teams of Envision engineers to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco – which was where this year’s show was held – in order to be in front of the latest technologies in cloud computing and virtualization.

We Do We Keep Attending?

Initially, Envision’s attendance at this annual event was solely to educate ourselves. Back in 2005, data center virtualization was new to the industry and to Envision, so VMworld helped to educate our company as we shifted away from deploying physical servers into the realm of the virtual.
By 2007, Envision was deploying only virtual servers and we have not rolled out a physical server since that time. Our experiences from VMworld helped Envision become recognized as one of the premier virtualization providers in the Northeast, but by 2008, our reasons for attending VMworld began to change.

With a few VMworld conferences and numerous virtualization deployments now under our belt, we came to realize that our continued attendance at VMworld needed to be about more than just educating ourselves. We needed to educate our customers and other IT professionals in our region – those who couldn’t get out to VMworld for themselves. We needed to bring VMworld back to them.

Introducing VMworld By Proxy

In early October of 2008, Envision launched our first “VMworld By Proxy” event. Held at the Save the Bay Center in Providence and attended by a handful of Envision’s clients, this inaugural event was a great success. Presented in a highly educational format, VMworld by Proxy’s aim was always to bring back the best of what Envision saw out at VMworld – cutting through the marketing to really get to the core of what technologies and changes would be critical to business IT in the coming months and years.

Year over year, VMworld by Proxy grew as word of the event spread. What began as a small group of Envision clients quickly turned into a must attend event as IT professionals from across New England, many of whom were not current Envision clients, turned to this event to educate themselves on the best of the best in virtualization and cloud computing technologies.

Success Fuels Growth

The success of VMworld By Proxy has helped us to continue improve the event. In 2011, VMworld By Proxy expanded from a half day event to a full day conference. The venue grew as well, as we turned to Twin River Casino in Lincoln, Rhode Island to host the growing conference – a venue which we will be returning to this year.

The way we organize the content for our event has changed over the years as well. For the past few years, we have allowed our audiences to tell us what they want us to seek out at VMworld. We have taken requests on our website before and during our time out at VMworld, building our schedules, in part, on what our website visitors and VMworld By Proxy attendees are asking us bring back for them. We have also turned to social media to help us better communicate with our audience – live tweeting from keynotes and presentations and even turning to Reddit to answer questions from interested users across the country and across the globe.

All of this information comes back with us as we program another day-long VMworld By Proxy event, gathering the best technologies and presenters to be a part of what has grown to become one the most successful VMworld recap events held anywhere.