Hear about the amazing Veeam Vanguard program. Maybe my dozen years of Veeam stories will inspire you to apply by Jan 21 2020!
Put your nomination(s) in by January 21 2020, all the instructions are in Nikola Pejková's post here.
You can nominate yourself (or be nominated by another person), so don’t be shy and apply by sending your profile summary or CV to
As of Jan 21 2020, nominations are now closed. Existing Vanguards renewed using the form that was emailed directly to them by Nikola Pejková on Dec 18 2019.
As Veeam calls it in their recent post Join the Veeam Vanguard 2020 class!:
But being a Vanguard is not given for life. You must earn it. This veeamazing group of professionals is truly a global community where each member, coming from their own career path, enriches the knowledge about our products with their unique experience from the field.
Because of this diversity, we decided not to set any guidelines to the Vanguards’ way of being active. Most of them have their own blogs where they share their experience with specific issues and scenarios encountered during their job duties. And often these encounters involve Veeam which is a great recipe for a truly unique experience-based content.
Certification
There's certifications, great for prepping for your day job work, and for getting your career moved forward. Been doing those since MSCS in 1997, as have many folks reading articles like this.
Then there's VMware's vExpert program, signifying how much you give back to the community, with lots of perks including access to VMware code and a chance to hang with Pat Gelsinger every year at VMworld! There are now thousands of vExperts around the world. A great program.
Giving Back
The Veeam Vanguard Program takes it further. Much further, well beyond access to the latest bested code including Veeam Availability Suite v10, and many chances to talk directly with developers. That was my favorite part of the whole Summit 2019 actually, spending about a half hour nerding out about my use of the Windows and Linux agents to protect and occasionally bare-metal-restore my most precious systems, those of my family. It was amazing, and a little magical. Standing there outside a bar in Prague, going on and on about what I learned using their software, and one of the actual developers soaking it all in, and asking for more details.
So if you are deserving and have done a signficant amount of work with Veeam's products, get yourself considered for the Veeam Vanguard program. You'll also get the opportunity to meet with the world's top bloggers and data protection experts at the annual Summit, in person! It's an amazing mix of dedicated Veeam employees, and fellow Veeam Vanguards, and a chance to get to know everybody a whole lot better than any online experience ever could. So yes, the Veeam Vanguard program is an incredible networking opportunity to be with around a hundred folks for several magical days and evenings in Europe. It's a real joy, and quite an honor.
The last 2 years were in Prague Czech Republic, which personally meant a LOT to me and my wife personally, see also a bit about my experiences in 2018 and 2019.
Friends
Some of the closest friends I've made at any conference were who I confided in last year, my second year there. The value in having fellow IT Professionals to discuss career and personal challenges with is incredible, and made all the difference for me as I went through some career and life stuff last year.
Funds
I'm not going to mince my words here. When I say Veeam Vanguard program is an opportunity, I mean travel is fully funded for all Veeam Vanguards. For me personally, that made ALL the difference. There was absolutely no way I'd be able to fly off to Europe these past two Octobers for this 4 day event if it wasn't for these funds that Rick Vanover arranged, generously provided to Vanguards. All Vanguard. Across the world. Even a prominent blogger from Reunion Island off the coast of Madagascar!
Factors
Frankly, there have been two huge factors that have kept me close to Veeam products ever since Veeam FastSCP arrived way back in 2007, which I used regularly doing professional services in 35 of 50 of the United States. You see, when somebody is paying your employer upwards of $200/hr to get servers racked and stacked, updated, and ESXi/vCenter installed, you better believe every minute counted when it came time to upload big Windows and Linux ISOs to their shiny new datastore.
Years later, in 2014, I was a multi-year Windows Home Server super-fan in my home lab. I became disillusioned when Microsoft essentially give it all up, the wonders of simple agent-based daily backups and bare-metal restores of PCs. I penned the headline Microsoft left the home backup server market, is Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE about to take over?, and I moved on, using Veeam Endpoint on a dozen or so systems in my extended family.
Then I wrote about Veeam. A lot, using their products in all sorts of scenarios, mostly about the experience of using Veeam Agent. I had quite a favorable impressions of their technical support whenever I did bump into a minor issue or bug.
Then there's the legendary candor of Anton Gostev. See what he has to say about the recent headline - Insight Partners to Acquire Veeam for US$5 Billion. Yes, you'll get to meet him at Veeam Vanguard Summit too!
So it was quite an honor when I was nominated into the program back in 2015, and I've been super thankful ever since!
I've had the honor of meeting Nikola Pejková in person, which was also a chance to thank Rick Vanover for finding her, she's certainly been taking the Veeam Vanguard program to the next level. I found her dedication and enthusiasm to be quite inspiring, and it was with great joy that I took that picture of Anton clapping as he finished saying some well-deserved kind words to hear at the Summit last year. Seen pictured at right.
I hope I've inspired at least a few readers to go ahead and apply. Please drop a comment below this article if you have any questions, and hopefully we get to meet in person someday.
So put your nomination(s) in soon, there's not a lot of time left, you only have until Jan 21 2020.
Fotos
Social
Disclosure
TinkerTry.com, LLC is not a Veeam Pro Partner, but I am a Veeam Vanguard Program member who received travel assistance getting to VeeamOn 2017, and Veeam Vanguard Summits 2018 and 2019. Veeam has been an advertiser on many virtualization sites for years now, and Veeam had a BuySellAds-purchased advertisement at TinkerTry as well, but that was well over 12 months ago.
All TinkerTry advertisement goes through third party BuySellAds. None of my articles are sponsored posts, and there are currently no affiliate links for Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE, or any of their other products. There are no commissions for any Veeam products folks buy after reading one of my articles.
TinkerTry takes extreme care to protect visitors by using only one ad network, BuySellAds, which has never had a security issue to date, and is very commonly used in the virtualization blogger community. Their CEO seems to get what's going on with ad blockers, evident in his recent post. I regularly receive lucrative offers from various companies looking to have me inject JavaScript trackers into TinkerTry, which I of course turn down.
I reserve and exercise the right to freely write about topics that I choose, whenever I choose to, an essential part of what makes blogging about home virtualization labs, storage, and backup so much fun for me. I tend to feature articles about stuff I actually use.
See also at TinkerTry
- Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows 3.0.2 supports Microsoft Windows 10 May 2019 Update [version 1903]
May 27 2019
