An awesome and humbling honor: Being a Cisco Champion

cisco_champions BADGE_200x200 This has been a really incredible year among the IT community for me. As a newly recognized entrant in the Top Virtualization Blogs in 2013 (Thank you to Eric Siebert and my awesome readers!), and a freshly minted vExpert (thanks to John Troyer, Corey Romero and this great peer community!), I am excited to also be a part of the newly created Cisco Champions group

This year is the inaugural year of the Cisco Champion program as led out by Cisco, and I couldn’t be more excited to be a part of this. This new community is a great addition to the IT social landscape and it will be a great way for myself and my peers to help to share our experiences in the Cisco ecosystem with our readers and fellow IT staffers.

Community = Win!

There is a common theme among the Cisco Champions, vExperts and EMC Elect representatives, and that is the love of community. The IT community is a very strong and interesting one which links us together through social tools (Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+) as well as through sponsored conferences and user group meetings.

By creating and supporting these community peer groups we are able to share information quickly and easily, and the phenomenal thing about our communities is that all are welcome! You can watch these conversations live on social media and you can attend the conferences as customers, partners and contributors.

With the advent of social tools in these communities, we have been able to extend the reach of these thought leaders, technologists, entrepreneurs, engineers, experts and pundits to each other, and to everyone who wishes to join into the conversation. A true open forum has been created and it is what supports the growth and strength of these groups.

Cisco Champions Info

As the list is compiled of all the members, and all of the approval forms and formalities are completed, we will be able to share out the list and Cisco will provide a Twitter list to be able to follow all of the participants in this exciting new community group!

There will be lots of news coming I’m sure about what the program will entail, and what we as Cisco Champions can do to bring the message back to everyone, and also to take the message into this community to fully engage everyone from the customer to the engineer who wrote the very code that makes the system work.

A careful note on this is that we, as Cisco Champions, do not represent Cisco. The title of Cisco Champion is provided to recognize a commitment by its participants to share great product information and to advocate the technologies that Cisco makes available for its customers and partners. This group has been created to allow for a better information sharing and an opportunity for us as technologists to work with great tools and technologies to provide information and guidance on how to make your datacenter or your cloud deployment a better place.

Go here for more information as it becomes available: http://www.cisco.com/web/about/facts_info/champions.html#~overview

Thank you to the Cisco team and to all of you who have made this opportunity possible for me and the other members. We hope to represent you well!

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.