We’re excited to announce Pivotal Vanguard, our first-ever global super user community, which is entirely made up of cloud users and practitioners who are passionate about Pivotal’s products and services and openly share their experience and knowledge with the community, Pivotal, and the industry. This exclusive membership group, by invitation only, is primarily comprised of enterprise customers, which represent Pivotal’s main lighthouse accounts including Comcast, Cerner, Liberty Mutual, Wells Fargo, Charles Schwab, Dick's Sporting Goods, Fiserv, DATEV, Intrado, McKesson, and more.
With over 50+ active founding members and counting, the group meets regularly to actively discuss and collaborate on developing cloud solutions. The group, primarily made up of PCF developers, platform operators, and cloud architects, discusses critical IT infrastructure challenges to develop and share ideas that will help them along their company’s Pivotal Platform journey.
When asked why one would want to join the Pivotal Vanguard community, Robert Stamps, Senior Cloud Architect at TD Ameritrade responded by saying, “It improves your knowledge to solve IT challenges while sharing your knowledge with peers across the industry. I can apply this knowledge to improve my company's overall service delivery to internal and external customers…it helps you know you are not alone in the challenges you face.” Furthermore, Joe Runyon, Web Systems Engineer at Wells Fargo stated, “I joined the Pivotal Vanguard to be involved with driving changes and priorities in the Pivotal community so that the products being offered and improved meets my needs. There's no better way to have your voice heard and learn from the best and brightest minds in the business.”
The current active members of the Pivotal Vanguard have been quite forthright, open and vocal about the added value they have received from the community thus far. According to Jon Ravencraft, Cloud Engineer at Kroger Co, “The biggest advantage I've gotten personally is validation that my organization is not ‘alone’ with the problems and cultural scenarios we find ourselves in. There are some very similar problems faced by many companies, regardless of the business vertical. While there are obviously different concerns around compliance practices, underlying infrastructure, and scale differences, there are still many valuable things to learn. The direct access to the product teams in a time and way that matters in terms of helping create a desired future state that is a help personally and to the community is awesome!”
The Vanguard community meets regularly every other week with Pivotal product and service leaders to discuss the latest technical challenges facing the cloud industry. Product leads present in an open forum and receives real-time feedback about their future roadmaps. On the same token, Vanguard members get to hear first hand the future product and service plans that can help their organizations go to market faster and smarter.
The idea of a superuser community comprised of enterprise customers has been in the plans at Pivotal for quite a while. Pivotal’s Senior Vice President, Products and Marketing, Ian Andrews, shared his thinking, "The Pivotal Vanguard is a program that I've wanted to launch since the early days of Pivotal. We're incredibly lucky to have so many passionate and engaged customers who want to directly collaborate as they progress through their transformation journey. Vanguard offers that community and facilitates direct engagement with Pivotal R&D to further improve our products and services."
The community leader is Brian Chang, Principal Technologist and “Chief of Pivotal Vanguard Tribe.” Brian, who is no stranger to building thriving, active customer advocacy communities, is pleased with the commitment and active engagement of Pivotal Vanguards “The Vanguard community is truly the best of the best—members are experienced, knowledgeable cloud leaders who have a pulse on the technology, and the need to solve complex IT challenges, with a willingness to share their opinions for the betterment of others.”
For those interested in learning more or to sign up to join the 2019 Pivotal Vanguard can go to: https://pivotal.io/vanguard.
