One of the biggest assets VMware has, excluding of course its product portfolio, is its VMTN Forum facility, which hosts a large and incredibly active community of professionals that quite often are more knowledgeable, faster and way more efficient than the company’s paid support.
Any new customer that wants to learn VMware technologies inside out, well beyond what the official training class can provide, should consider investing at least 6-9 months just to follow the threads on the VMTN board in passive mode.
There’s a large number of VMware employees that contributed the success of VMTN. The first one that comes to mind for sure is John Troyer, Senior Social Media Strategist, who definitively is the VMware front man for everything related to the community.
Behind the scenes there’s at least another one: Robert Dell’Immagine, Director of Community Program, who just left VMware after almost six years.
Dell’Immagine joined the security vendor Qualys, where he’s covering the same role since February.