By Nicole Wei, Marketing Manager. – I want to move to Australia. Specifically, I want to move to Melbourne (pronounced “Melbin”). I love the thought of early sunrises and late sunsets. Love the fact that every day was almost like a fairy tale with the sun shining, beautiful people smiling, and safe living. Who wouldn’t want to move to this place? Carpe diem. Life is good. Not every person is as lucky as I am. Actifio sent me 14,000+ miles from Bean Town to Australia (“‘stralia”) or what they call the “Land Down Under.” Initial reaction? Shock. Subsequent reaction? Pure excitement.
Yes, it was beautiful and sunny, 95 degrees outside all week. Jealous, right? But, we had business to take care of INSIDE the Sydney Masonic Centre and the Melbourne Hilton on the Park. We didn’t care; we were pumped for the 2 VMUGs in Aussie. With over 50 hours and 20,000 miles of travel under our belts, reps from Korea, US, and local Aussies arrived to support these well-attended events. There was plenty of buzz in the room. We wore our bright, orange Actifio polos loud and proud as we greeted over 500 attendees throughout the 2 days.
(Sydney VMUG)
(Actifio in Action at Melbourne VMUG )
Jeff O’Connor and Anthony Vandewerdt, Australia’s local solutions architects, presented “Solving the Data Explosion for Virtual Environments” to over 65 attendees, one of the best attended sessions at the entire VMUG! In addition, almost every attendee came back to the booth for more info. Questions were flowing and our story quickly started to resonate. I took a walk around and surveyed attendees after the Actifio session. Here were some of the responses:
“Never thought to tackle copy data, Actifio makes perfect sense”
“Quick and painless”
“Huge increase in cost savings”
“Speed up”
“Currently takes us 20 hours to restore, could do this in seconds potentially”
(Jeff O’Connor solutions architect, presented to a room full of eager attendees)
(Anthony Vandewerdt – solutions architect, presented at Melbourne VMUG to a packed room)
vFlipCup. Need I say more? If you heard about our amazing event at VMworld 2012 San Francisco, the orange cups broke out again and more good fun was had at our post VMUG happy hour. Apparently drinking games aren’t big in Aussie, but after this VMUG, I reckon vFlipCup will spread across the country like wildfire.
(vFlipCup at The Civic Hotel Saloon with attendees from Sydney VMUG)
Actifio Poker Run was also a big hit. In two days, we generated over 300 touch points between Actifio and customers. What was Actifio Poker Run you ask? Rules were simple. Come to our booth, you got a playing card; come to our session, you got 2 more cards; ask a question, one more; and so on. At the end of the day, the person that had the best poker hand won an iPad mini. People were intrigued and as a result, we generated a huge turnout of people wanting to find out what Actifio was all about. Just look at the excitement on their faces below!
(Actifio Poker Run cards – more info: https://www.actifio.com/sydney-vmug/)
(Melbourne VMUG attendees showed their best poker hand at Actifio booth)
(Winner of best poker hand – royal flush – unheard of. He asked a lot of great questions…)
I can’t even begin to describe the amount of slang that I learned on this trip. But my question to my new Aussie friends was “why?” Why do you say “chewna” instead of “tuna”? Why do you say “toMAHto” and not “poTAHto”? My favorite of the week: “thongs” refer to flip flops, and “g’banger” refers to thongs on your buttocks. Clever.
We may say things very differently in the same language, but after talking to countless Aussies over the course of the week, it became clear that the copy data problem was a common issue whether in the States or in the land down under. Good thing we were #BornGlobal…