This time of year is always exciting as the planning for VMworld kicks off and the Call For Papers comes out. This is your opportunity to share with the world how you’ve used VMware technologies in innovative ways, share technical deep dive content, and educate others on how to achieve massive success. Here is my perspective on submitting sessions and what I learned from VMworld last year.

Duncan Epping announced the “VMworld 2013 call for papers open!”  on Yellow-Bricks the other day with some excellent tips on what you might want to consider if you are going to submit a session. Last year was my first VMworlds and I attended and presented at both VMworld USA in San Francisco and also VMworld Europe in Barcelona. So I’m a newbie in comparison to some of the regular presenters and session submitters, but even so I had 3 sessions accepted last year. All of these sessions were also well received by the audience. This year I want to take it up a notch and do even better. So here is what I’m considering generically for sessions.

Firstly as Duncan mentioned keeping the sessions along the three major themes of Software Defined Datacenter, Hybrid Cloud and Mobility. For me I’m more aligned with Software Defined Datacenter and Hybrid Cloud, specifically with respect for Business Critical Apps. So I plan to submit sessions along those lines. I’ll be targeting a Technical and Advanced Technical audience. But there are other categories as well, including for Partners.

The sessions should be applicable to as large a cross section of the audience as possible (vSphere Administrators and Architects mostly), and provide deep dive education content. The sessions are only 1 hour, so you are really constrained for time. Your session needs to be compressed into one hour including any time for answering questions, so you should be able to deliver the main content in 45 minutes. So you don’t want your topic to be too broad.

When you’re submitting the sessions you will be asked for the title, description of the session (value proposition) and key take aways. This is your chance to make the session look as compelling as possible and this is where you have to sell your session. You will be competing directly with potentially a couple of thousand other options. So you really need to make your session stand out.

I found last year that the most popular sessions in terms of audience numbers and ratings were core technical deep dive sessions. Some of which had audience numbers of up to 900. These sessions took a particular topic and delivered very deep and leading edge content on that topic and the audience left having learned some very important aspects that they could use immediately.

I would say make your session original, well thought out, leading edge, relevant, and aligned with the core VMware strategies. Hopefully this will help your chances of success. Read Duncan’s tips and then when you’re ready submit your session. Remember the submission deadline is April 12th, so you don’t have long to get your thoughts together. Good luck and look forward to seeing you at VMworld.

http://www.vmworld.com/community/conference/cfp

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This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com, by Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2013 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.