Share Your Expertise: Join the Call for Speakers

The heart of the Detroit Metro VMUG is the collective intelligence of our members. We believe the most valuable insights don’t come from a sales pitch, but from the engineers and architects who are in the trenches every day. If you’ve spent your weekend troubleshooting a complex migration or designing a creative workaround for a legacy system, your peers want to hear about it.

We prioritize practitioner-led sessions that skip the high-level fluff and dive straight into the "weeds" of modern infrastructure. Whether you’re a seasoned presenter or a first-time speaker, our community provides a supportive, high-impact stage to share your technical journey.

Why Step Up to the Mic?

  • Showcase Your Success & "Failure" Stories: Real-world IT isn't always a perfect demo. Present your specific use cases, successful migration stories, or automation wins. More importantly, share the challenges you faced along the way—nothing helps the community more than learning how to avoid a potential "gotcha" in a production environment.

  • Establish Your Personal Brand: Position yourself as a subject-matter expert and thought leader within the Detroit tech ecosystem. Speaking at VMUG is a powerful way to build your professional profile, expand your network beyond your current organization, and gain recognition among Michigan's top IT talent.

  • Give Back to the Community: The "User" in VMUG is what makes us strong. By sharing your knowledge, you help your peers master new VMware capabilities and navigate the evolving landscape of Broadcom/VMware solutions. Your 30-minute presentation could save a fellow member dozens of hours of research and troubleshooting.

  • Refine Your Technical Communication: Explaining complex concepts to a room of experts is the best way to solidify your own understanding. Use our platform to sharpen your presentation skills and get direct feedback from some of the sharpest minds in the industry.

 

2026 Inspiration: What’s Hot in the Detroit Tech Scene?

Not sure what to present? To help you brainstorm, we’ve identified the key challenges and innovations that Detroit IT professionals are currently navigating. Whether you want to share a "Day 2" operations win or a strategic architectural shift, these topics are currently top-of-mind for our 974 members:

1. The VCF 9.0 Era & Migration Strategies

  • Mastering VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF): Share your experience with the unified stack. How are you handling the transition to VCF 9.0?

  • Exit or Evolution? Many teams are evaluating alternatives like Hyper-V, Nutanix, or OpenSource (KVM/Proxmox). If you’ve done a pilot or a full-scale migration, your peers want to know the "real" TCO and technical hurdles.

  • Licensing & FinOps: How are you navigating the shift to subscription models? Share your strategies for optimizing core density and reducing licensing waste.

2. Private AI & The "Agentic" Data Center

  • Private AI Services (PAIS): Are you running LLMs on-prem using VMware Private AI? Share how you’re balancing data privacy with the demand for GPU-backed workloads.

  • Agentic AI for IT Ops: How are you using autonomous AI agents to manage monitoring, self-healing pipelines, or ticket resolution?

  • GPU Virtualization: Best practices for managing NVIDIA/AMD accelerators within vSphere.

3. Resilience & Survivable Security

  • Ransomware Recovery: Walk us through your air-gapped backup strategy or your experience with VMware Ransomware Recovery.

  • Micro-segmentation at Scale: Practical tips for implementing Zero Trust using NSX Distributed Firewall without breaking your production applications.

  • Continuous Compliance: How you use SDDC Manager or Aria to automate audit-ready reporting.

4. Modernizing the Motor City (Automotive & Manufacturing)

  • Edge Computing on the Factory Floor: How are you deploying vSphere at the edge to support real-time manufacturing analytics or IoT?

  • Sovereign Cloud: Navigating data residency and regulatory mandates in global supply chains.

  • GitOps & Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Using Terraform, Ansible, or Pulumi to manage your "Detroit-sized" infrastructure.