As of today, I am proud to call myself an officially recognized VMUG Leader for the Belgian community. This is a huge responsibility, and I am excited to work together with Maarten Van Driessen and Jens Herremans to make sure that we fill in the void left behind by the former VMUG Leader, Erik Schils.

I am thrilled to take on this leadership role for many reasons. Firstly, it will push me out of my comfort zone, which is always a good thing. I am used to speaking with customers and peers, but being in front of an auditorium and speaking to hundreds of people is still daunting. However, I am excited to learn and grow from this experience.

Another reason I am eager to take on this role is the challenge of creating an event that is educational for a variety of different people. I want to make sure that everyone can learn something new and valuable from our events. Whether it’s learning about a specific technology or networking with fellow professionals, I want to ensure that our events provide value to all attendees.

Furthermore, this leadership role will allow me to expand my own network. I will have the opportunity to interact with a wide range of people during the event, including partners and sponsors. Additionally, I will be able to network with VMUG leaders from all over the world and learn from their experiences on how to create successful events.

Finally, I am excited to make our event grow bigger than ever before and potentially even surpass VMUG NL. This is an ambitious goal, but I believe that we can achieve it with hard work, dedication, and a focus on providing value to our attendees.

Officially launched in August 2010, the VMware User Group (VMUG) is an independent, global, customer-led organization that aims to maximize members’ use of VMware and partner solutions through knowledge sharing, training, collaboration, and events. In Belgium, this is an annual VMUG event that has been hosted in Mechelen since its inception. The event provides a space for partners, vendors, and customers to meet, network, and attend sessions hosted by industry and community experts.

In addition to the annual VMUG event, we also have the concept of “vBeers,” which is a community-based initiative that focuses on connecting like-minded people who have a passion for technology and virtualization. These events are held monthly (every 3rd Thursday of the month) with one or two short sessions. The sessions can be technology-related, but they don’t have to be. The goal of vBeers is to provide a low-entry platform for inexperienced public speakers to gain experience and test their public speaking skills between similar vGeeks.

We want to fuse the VMUG and vBeers concepts into one event, creating an event like VMUG with the atmosphere and energy of a vBeers. We want to return to the basics of VMUG and provide practical value to our attendees. As leaders, we are just a small portion of how we see the VMUG concept grow in Belgium. We need YOUR input on how we can bring VMUG to the next level.

To gather your feedback and ideas, we have created a short survey that will only take a few minutes of your time. This survey will provide essential information on what we can do to make VMUG the perfect format for you. Please click here to access the survey: [insert link to survey].

We are currently working hard on getting things rolling and hope to host a physical/virtual VMUG later this year in June! We’re also planning to do an online pre-VMUG session, which will be a 2-hour event with lots of community speakers presenting smaller sessions. And here, we will also announce our VMUG event.

For the vBeers, we host these every 3rd Thursday of each month. We’re also thinking about organizing bigger vBeers twice or three times per year, where we would invite a partner to dive deeper into a specific area. Stay tuned and looking forward to seeing you on our next vBeers or VMUG!