With over 22,000 attendees this year it was difficult to fit everyone into the hall so we chose to spend the general session from within the comfort of the Hang Space where they were broadcasting the General Session.

First up was Robin Matlock, Chief Marketing Officer at vmware.  Robin invited up 10 Alumni members to do a top 10 countdown of the best moments at vmworld which included moments like "Smashmouth playing at Treasure Island", "Checking out the cars at the racetrack in Las Vegas" and when "vRAM became a 4-letter word".

A group of ad men brainstorm ideas for a new SolarWinds Virtualization Manager video. Starring Cat Johnson in his break-out role. Brought to you by SolarWinds.

Unbelievable!  It's already been a year since we last came together as a community at the world's largest virtualization trade show event, VMworld.  And in less than three weeks, we're getting the virtualization band back together again for VMworld 2013 in the beautiful city of San Francisco.  Moscone, prepare yourself!   

As usual, if you are attending VMworld, your schedule is already filling up as quickly as the hotel rooms around the city.  This show is jam packed with hands on labs, breakout sessions, certifications, booths on the solutions exchange floor, keynote presentations, food (hoping for something good this year), networking and a number of other things taking place in the hang out space.  All that, and we haven't even talked about what's going on OUTSIDE of the Moscone walls yet.  Talk about trade show goodness!  There is something going on for everyone at every waking minute of the day.

Brian Ducharme of VMBlog.com speaks with Calvin Hsu, VP of Product Marketing, Desktop and Apps during Citrix Synergy 2013.

Calvin Hsu – Vice President, Product Marketing, Desktops and Apps
Calvin Hsu is responsible for the go-to-market strategy for the market-leading desktop virtualization solutions, Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix XenApp. Hsu leads the team that is evangelizing centralized desktop delivery as a primary enabler of customer initiatives such as BYO, enterprise mobility and business continuity, and is helping to drive an industry transition to delivering desktops and apps from the cloud.

Since joining Citrix in 2004, Hsu has helped the company launch major software releases of both XenDesktop and XenApp, which helped position the company to reach $2B in revenue. Hsu has 16 years of experience in software technology marketing and management, and prior to Citrix led product marketing for an enterprise storage virtualization software company. Hsu also has experience in data quality management and database requirements methodologies, and was a management consultant to federal government agencies.

Hsu holds degrees from The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

Follow Calvin’s blog: http://blogs.citrix.com/author/calvinhs/

Brian Ducharme of VMBlog.com speaks with Ahmed Datoo about the mobile platform that enables Project Avalon.

Ahmed Datoo, Vice President, Product Marketing, Mobile Platforms Group

Ahmed Datoo heads product marketing for the Mobile Platforms group, leading the mobility go-to-market strategy for Citrix. He joined Citrix with the acquisition of Zenprise, where he was chief marketing officer. Prior to Zenprise, Datoo was global director of product development at EDS. In this role, he built and launched several workflow automation and monitoring automation modules that generated multi-million dollar savings globally. Previously, Datoo was a member of Loudcloud's product management team where he focused on monitoring, storage and performance networking products, and a brand manager at Yahoo! where he co-developed the print and radio promotions for Yahoo! Shopping.

Datoo began his career as a strategy consultant at Accenture where he created high-tech product development strategies for telcos, media conglomerates and hardware manufacturers. His experience in the technology industry spans strategic planning, brand marketing, software engineering and product management.

Datoo holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and an MBA, from Stanford University.

VMBlog.com takes a look at Appcara and talks with Paul Speciale, their Chief Marketing Officer on the show floor at Citrix Synergy 2013.

Appcara provides a flexible and easy-to-use cloud application platform called AppStack. We focus on streamlining and accelerating time-to-market for distributed Workloads into the cloud, whether they are multi-tier business apps, Big Data apps or custom apps. In addition, we free users to select the most optimal cloud target for their apps, whether public or private.

AppCara website