Once again, it’s time to break down the vExpert group and take a look at how this collection of people is organized. I was surprised at how well received this blog post was last year, and to have people asking when I would put it together this year! Some notes, before we get started:
- All of the data below has been contributed by vExperts themselves or has been pulled from public sources like Twitter and LinkedIn. I wasn’t given any information about the vExpert group by VMware other than the publicly shared list.
- The graphics I’m using below are dynamic and will update themselves (on refresh) as data is added or changed on the primary Google Spreadsheet. There are about 200 or so records that haven’t been updated yet, so the stats will change as those people add their information! If you think/know the numbers are wrong, have a vExpert log in and update the data!
- The link to the Google Spreadsheet is in the vExpert forum on VMTN and is only available to vExperts.
With that out of the way, let’s look at some of the data!
- While the vExpert team is still predominately based in the USA, the number of foreign-based award winners is pretty impressive.
- Twitter is increasingly becoming a must-have for vExperts.
- 330 of 577 vExperts have a blog or other online presence listed
- 67 people have been awarded the vExpert designation for all five years of the program
- 45 have been awarded for four years
- 83 have been awarded for three years
- 131 were awarded the vExpert for the second time
- 250 were awarded for the first time. There may also be some people who were awarded in 2009 and 2010 who are coming back to the program after a two year absence, but since that data wasn’t included with the list this year we won’t know until those folks update the spreadsheet…
- 461 of 577 vExperts have their employer publicly available. They are employed by a total of 302 different companies, and the breakdown looks like this:
I think that some of these companies deserve a lot of credit. Veeam added two additional members this year, leading the list of VMware software partners. Varrow decisively took over the lead for VMware partners, doubling their number of vExperts to 8, and HP increased theirs to 9! VCE (my employer) also made big strides, adding 7 more vExperts to lead all companies other than VMware and EMC with 12 total!Also notable is that while VMware grew their number significantly, from 33 to 55, EMC decreased to 17, possibly coinciding with the re-organization of the vSpecialist team and the number of people who moved from EMC to VMware. - 34 companies had multiple vExperts on staff
- 269 companies had one vExpert on staff
- A total of 302 companies world-wide have a vExpert on staff!
As in past years, I’m very happy to be part of this group. It really is both a recognition of the effort put in and a platform to be able to give back even more to the community. In 2011 I was shocked that I was included, in 2012 I was surprised, and now in 2013 I feel like I understand my role. Thank you to all of our friends at VMware that make this program possible, and thank you for letting me part of it!
[UPDATED]
Luc Dekens had made a comment below about being interested in the vExpert “density” per capita in each of the countries represented. Once he gave me a link to a Google Spreadsheet with global population data in it, I couldn’t resist. It required me to teach myself the Google Visualization API Query Language, which was fun, but I got the data he wanted (Please note, these percentages are per 1,000 people, so if you want to see the percentage of the actual population, you’ll need to add three zeros after the decimal point. I’ve left it this way because it’s easier to chart the numbers, but thank you to Jimmy Hester for pointing out the math in the comments!) :
As you can see, Iceland takes the cake with 0.3% of the entire population of the country holding a vExpert designation. 🙂 Luc’s guess about the Netherlands was close, but they ended up tied for second with Luxembourg! Any other stats you’d like to see?