tl:dr = as part of Technical Marketing, I’ll be in Sydney, Singapore, Seoul, and Manila in November to present at VMware vForums about ransomware trends, how Rubrik helps, and core Rubrik capabilities along with our awesome local teams. January will take me to Taipei, Mumbai, and Singapore. Look me up if you’re located there! I’ll be posting on Twitter and LinkedIn as well.

While I’ve been in this industry for a while, I haven’t (yet) lost my appetite to learn both technical and non-technical aspects of the job. For example, doing booth presentations at conferences this year was a fun challenge. Compared to a 30-40 minute session, it’s a totally different dynamic to condense down your key points to 3-5 minutes while entertaining people at the same time. Booth presentations can be very humbling. At core, people usually aren’t there to hear “you” – at best you’ll be easy on the ears and maybe even amusing as they wait for the prize drawing. I decided to take it as a challenge and upon being paired with a magician (thanks Lenovo!) took that as permission to use a few PowerPoint transitions usually frowned upon in a business context. Yes, the Vortex transition should probably not be used when meeting a CIO.

In that light, I’m looking forward to meeting current and future Rubrik customers in the Asia-Pacific area as well as presenting at (3) vForums in Sydney, Singapore, and Seoul. I truly believe Rubrik’s message of Simplicity + Providing More in the data management space is something that applies globally and am excited to talk about it.

While I’ve spent a good bit of time in Asia for personal/family reasons, I’ve not presented to APAC audiences or had many business meetings in the area. Given that, I’ve been chatting with those who have done business there to understand how best to be effective while discussing Rubrik – always a student.

Example of what I’ve learned = go easy on jokes…they often don’t translate well and especially for English as a Second Language speakers are more annoying than amusing. Simply convey the information in a personable way.

As to specific locations….well…

First up is presenting at the Sydney vForum on November 2 on Ransomware Trends + How Rubrik Can Help and customer/partner meetings on November 3. Believe it or not, more than half this presentation is nothing to do with Rubrik and pure education – proof here on Slideshare. After a bit of vacation and meeting with Rubrik employees in Beijing, I’ll then next be presenting at the Singapore vForum on November 14 with meetings the day before – am looking forward to presenting jointly with Ben Troch.

Next up is the Seoul vForum on November 16 (same presentation as Sydney) with meetings on November 17.

To close out November, I’ll be in Manila November 21-22 for customer meetings & partner enablement before heading back to the US for AWS re:Invent 2017.

If you’re in any of those cities and seeing this, I’d love to meet you – don’t hesitate to reach out!