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5 Replies Last post: Oct 11, 2009 9:45 PM by legal1

Vendor Presentations posted: Sep 17, 2009 11:01 AM

bkurt78

3 posts since
Aug 18, 2008

I think thus far our vendor presentations have been very good and I would to thank them all for sponsoring the meetings so far. They have done a great job. I wanted to mention something on the forums to see if anyone else felt the same way as I did after the last meeting. I went into meeting hoping to learn of indepth information on Veeam's products and how it compared to the other competitor's in the market. Instead we got like a 10 minute intro to the products and that was about it. I know the Veeam folks did this because as they said they didn't want it to be a commercial or a big sales ptich and I can understand that. However, the reason I took time out of my day was to go to the meeting and learn about their products more in depth. I think vendors can discuss the technical aspects of their products and maybe why they are better than their competitors and still end up not having a big sales pitch. In fact I think having competing vendors at a meeting and having them discuss why one is better than the other would be a great meeting.

So I guess I'm throwing this out there to see if others felt this way and would like to entertain the idea of having vendors doing more of a technical presentation of their products rather than the sales pitch type of thing. Also, product demos would be awesome to see as well, whether it be from other group members or from vendors. What do others think?

Re: Vendor Presentations

1. Sep 17, 2009 11:23 AM

in response to: bkurt78

legal1

10 posts since
May 3, 2006

I can certainly try & clarify that point with future presenters. We want tech info and not a sales pitch, but some description of how their product works versus the competing one is important too I was astonished at how short the presentation was. Usually they want to take more than time than we allot them given what it costs to sponsor a meeting. In Veeam's case I believe it was partly because the guy talking was an engineer and not a sales guy. We had questions that opened the door for him to represent competitive differences - which any sales guy worth his salt would have pounced on - he didn't. Just another wild card in any presentation - how good the presenter is.

For the next meeting, I tried to get a co-sponsored presentation, specifically for competitive differences in servers and/or storage. I even explained that it wasn't intended to be adversarial, but Dell would not present in conjunction with other vendors. I have seen that in the past with other tech companies for a variety of reasons so it isn't just Dell. I guess thats why we need our employers to pony up the $ so we can go to VMworld

Re: Vendor Presentations

2. Sep 20, 2009 7:31 AM

in response to: bkurt78

Doug Hazelman

13 posts since
Dec 19, 2007

Thank you for the feedback. As vendors we have to walk a fine line of giving good technical content while not appearing like a commercial. It's also not our intention to use the VMUG's to "bash" the competition but I do understand people want to know what makes us so great in comparison.

I have attended and presented at numerous VMUG's and I've found that the audiences vary quite a bit. I'm wondering if the VMUG community feels that maybe there should be some standards for vendor presentions or maybe each VMUG would like to create their own based on their membership. For instance, if a vendor was supplied with an general outline of what the members want to see, it would be much easier to craft a targeted presentation or product demo.

We're willing to listen and want to make sure that we provide the content that your members want, just let us know.

Thanks,

-doug

-
Doug Hazelman
Director, Global Systems Engineer Group
Veeam Software

Re: Vendor Presentations

3. Sep 21, 2009 11:05 AM

in response to: bkurt78

afrideger

1 posts since
Feb 7, 2008

Product demos sound great...I was actually thinking the same thing when I got back to my desk after the last meeting. It would have been nice to see the products. For example when the Dell presenter comes to present Storage maybe they can remote into a sandbox or something and show us the management console of an actual SAN, add drive space to it and what not. Also interested in knowing more about SAN replication.

Anybody in the group currently replicating SAN to SAN? Curious on what application your using and over what type of link and is it going across town or across states.....

Re: Vendor Presentations

4. Oct 2, 2009 5:01 AM

in response to: bkurt78

adgross

4 posts since
Nov 17, 2005

I agree that more in-depth technical information would make the meetings much more useful. I saw many familiar VMUG faces at the presentation at DMC on View and ThinApp and I believe that all who attended walked away with a pretty clear understanding of how those products worked and might work in their environment. I didn't feel like that presentation became a commercial for VMware.

As another potential for topic for discussion, are there any members that are using remote locations for disaster recovery who would like to share their thoughts on the subject? We are beginning to look at installing VMware in a remote location for disaster recovery of both physical and virtual machines and I would be interested in hearing how others are approaching it. Here are some questions I have:

-are you relying on your off-site backups to restore your VMware environment to the remote location, or do you use SAN replication or other backup tools such as Veeam or vRanger?

-how are you handling bringing up current physical machines in VMware at the remote location?

Re: Vendor Presentations

5. Oct 11, 2009 9:45 PM

in response to: bkurt78

legal1

10 posts since
May 3, 2006

I was looking for any vendor forms that fit your description rather than recreating the wheel and haven't had much luck. This is a one of those issues that's hard to quantify - where to draw the line between a sales pitch and tech info - but people come to these events looking for what your product does differently from the competition. Certainly I wouldn't want vendors to start flaming the other guys, yet I think you can still mention them in the context of how you might do things differently and why it is better - or not.

While I have some ideas on defining presentation parameters and expectations in the future, I would like to hear your ideas. We each have a perception of where the line is crossed - what do you think is an appropriate way to handle and/or define this?

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