From my perspective the immediate changes are over. I am performing the same type of role that I was pre-acquisition. It has a different job title but job titles have never been that important to me. It’s more about what I am doing than what it’s called. Since I’m starting to be more publicly active, I feel that the time is right to explain what I do.
I work in a technical marketing role. This makes me part of a product team within VMware. People in these roles are typically aligned to one or two specific products or solutions. Day-to-day we are not customer facing. However, we’re often found at customer events (VMUG, VMware Explore, etc.) and we might be brought into customer conversations by our respective product managers or customer account teams.
Our job is to know our products very well and help enable our field teams, customers and partners. To explain new features and capabilities. To boldly go… (blatant Star Trek reference).
When I started in this role over 18 months ago, my focus was actually three-fold:
- VMware Aria Automation (formerly vRealize Automation or vRA)
- VMware Aria Orchestrator (formerly vRealize Orchestrator or vRO)
- A new solution called “Cloud Guardrails”
All three belonged to VMware’s Cloud Management Business Unit (CMBU), which later got renamed as the Modern Applications and Management Business Group (MAMBG) when the Pivotal solutions got folded in. Guardrails evolved and became Tanzu Guardrails at VMware Explore 2023. At this point it was taking up much more of my time than the Aria solutions, which were much more mature.
Post acquisition, MAMBG was split up. The VMware Aria solutions became part of the VCF division, aligned with VMware’s industry leading core platform. (It’s still industry leading, anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something! Our competitors’ products didn’t magically leapfrog us. Don’t believe their FUD!)
The Tanzu solutions were placed in their own division. Inevitably therefore, with my focus on Tanzu Guardrails, that is now where I sit. I manage technical marketing for the Governance and Security portions of the Tanzu Platform. This also now includes SaltStack and the solutions formerly known as VMware Aria Automation Config and VMware Aria Automation for Secure Hosts.
Of course, you can expect content from me to focus on those topics. Not exclusively though. There are many supporting or related technologies out there that I enjoy learning about and talking about, and in that respect I am still the same as I was. And I still have my homelab :grinning_face:.
One final note, people often associate the name “Tanzu” with Kubernetes. That’s not correct. Tanzu is all about Application Delivery, part of it involves containers, whether they be Kubernetes or Bosh, but it’s not just Kubernetes. A lot of people don’t realise that there’s so much more to Tanzu than just Kubernetes. At KubeCon in Paris earlier this year, I had a number of people start conversations by saying “I have Tanzu…”. When that happened, a good number of them were talking about Kubernetes in vSphere. After I had answered their questions I also spent a few minutes talking with them about what else Tanzu does. I think that a lot of those people were pleasantly surprised by what we’re doing.
If you’d like to learn a little more about Tanzu then there are lots of resources out there and plenty more to come! However, I’d suggest starting with Purnima’s blog on how VMware Tanzu Simplifies Accelerated App Delivery and also watch the replay of our recent VMware Tanzu Defined event.