When I finally figured out the Gestalt’s Tech Field Day would be making a stop at EMC HQ (in Hopkinton), I knew I wanted to find a way to go say hi to people I’ve interacted with online for the last several months.

To bring people up to speed, Gestalt IT has been sponsoring “field days” – bringing together IT vendors and techie attendees who are not analysts or members of the press (so they wouldn’t normally get this close of an inside view). They were in Boston this time, and EMC was one of their stops.

I was able to find a copy of the Information and Storage Management book for everyone. I was a little nervous because I gave it out before they got  Iomega swag. But they all seemed pretty happy with a book!

So I didn’t get to tell the guys one important thing since @stu only let me talk for about 20 seconds. (To be fair I wasn’t expecting to say anything – so Stu was very gracious to let me bring presents and let me explain myself).

I wanted to tell the guys this: one important thing about the ISM book is that it was written to be vendor neutral – so the content is all about the underlying technologies of our field.

I got to hear the end of Barry Burke’s presentation, and all of Chad Sacak‘s presentation.

I just wish there had been more time to sit and talk with people, but the bloggers were whisked away as soon as the presentations were over. But it was nice to at least see some of these guys in real life!

Next week EMC Education will present a free webcast about managing information in challenging economic times. So why is this something you should consider attending?

Background

For the last several years, my organization at EMC has conducted a survey of storage managers and professionals about the challenges facing people that manage the world’s information. Every year our executives present the findings from the survey at EMC World.

Findings

Storage managers marked the lack of skilled storage professionals as one of their pain points this year. Additionally, managers feel that only about 30 percent of their teams are properly skilled to carry out their responsibilities.

Here’s my question: if we have these knowledge gaps in the physical world of information and storage management, what is going to happen when we move this into the cloud? It seems to me that having a strong understanding of how the physical environments work is going to be a necessity once we start virtualizing everything.

Could lack of skilled professionals be a barrier to private cloud adoption?

I’m really proud of  my organization for measuring this gap, and putting together programs to train people to address this problem. We have an open storage curriculum, our Academic Alliance, and even a vendor neutral book on Storage and Information Management.

Sign up for the Webcast!

If you missed EMC World, this is your chance to hear more about this study. Here is how to sign up for the event:

Date: June 26, 2009

Time: 11 AM Eastern

Presenters: Alok Shrivastava, Senior Director, EMC Education Services and Joe Milardo, Director, EMC Education Services

Event Registration

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