Red Hat Customer Convergence Event - Madison, WI

Hi Folks,

First poster, common lurker wanting to share some exciting news from the trenches.

From conversations with a lot of customers we have found that many of you are unable to join us at summit for a variety of reasons. Travel budget, company policy, etc can get in the way of the smorgasbord of value that is Red Hat Summit, and we understand. With this in mind we are doing a trial of a regional Customer Convergence Event. The first one is this week in Madison, WI, but if it works out we will be taking it across the country.

The Customer Convergence event is a regional 1-day conference where we fly in specialists on topics of interest to the customers in that region. The planning starts months ahead with a survey of customers and what they would like to hear about. From this we pick out the topics and reach out to the developers responsible for that area of code for comment. They often are very excited to join us for the day and talk about their passion, though I admit that sometimes all I hear is a mumble from behind the tall pile of Dew cans & pizza boxes about register this or that getting clobbered… oh well :)

This week's Madison event is very exciting to us as the trial run. We have specialists from Storage, Systems Management, Performance, and Clustering joining us for the day in the sunny city on the Isthmus. Here are the topics selected by the local customers:

Device Mapper Multipath & Online Storage Reconfiguration - Ben Marzinski
Red Hat Clustering: Best Practices & Pitfalls - Lon Hohberger
Performance Tuning Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 - Jeremy Eder

We also have round-table discussions with the above experts and including Thomas Cameron to join the talk about Systems Management.

How do you guys feel about these kinds of events? Interested in having one in your region? How could we make it better? I'll be posting the feedback receive ed from attendees, presentations, discussions, etc a week or so after the event, stay tuned!

Thanks!
-Guil