Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

I’ve just attended the 1st annual VMware User Group Leader Summit, a day and a half event hosted at the VMware campus in Palo Alto to share best practice amongst the various groups around the world to better the organisation which was an excellent event.

The event was an impressive showing of commitment from VMware to the community in terms of the focus it has, but was more impressive was the scale of effort that the VMUG leaders put into their events – there aren’t many real rewards for being a VMUG leader other than some kudos and a pat on the back and it’s a very clear sign of people’s passion for the technology that they give this time freely.

Some leaders are self-employed or work full-time for an employer – but generally the time they give is their own personal, unpaid time as vacation time or work time that has to be made-up in personal time.

The London VMUG group of which I’m a leader in is currently going through a transition to a new team of leaders (I’m staying on but 3 leaders are stepping down after many years of service) and we’ve spent some time trying to quantify how much effort is required to run a VMUG group so we can set expectations appropriately for our new incoming leaders;

This is based on our experiences running 3 London (~100 attendees) and 1 UK national event (~600 attendees) each year.

Disclaimer this is very finger in the air analysis (and a little bit of fun) – but I do think it’s interesting to look at the opportunity cost of such activities (info on opportunity cost here) and other interesting {honest!} economics stuff here

Between the 4 of us we have 4 full-day meetings, so 4 man-days** contributed per meeting which we attend*, plus on average 2hrs of calls per month = 24hrs = 3 man-days/yr. (@8hrs/day) – so individually each leader contributes 7 man-days per year of effort to manage and run our events.

*I’ve not managed to sit through and enjoy a session at the London or UK VMUG meetings since I became a leader, because there is always something that needs doing, cats to herd, things to organise – not complaining, but – that’s the truth!

Our leadership team consists of 4 people, if we said the average group is 3 leaders (some have 7+, some have just 1!).

I don’t have access to all the details of the global VMUG chapters, but if you work on the basis that there was 1 leader invited from each active VMUG globally to the summit, there were 93 leaders in-attendance so let’s base our numbers on 93 ‘active’ groups – although I appreciate there are probably more as not everyone would be able to attend.

if we said an average of 3 leaders per ‘active’ group, each contributing 7 man-days per annum that’s 1,953 man-days per annum contributed by leaders to the VMUG community events. (3 x (4+3) ) x 93 = 1,953 man-days

Given there is an average of 251 working days per year that’s 7.7 man-years

Now, to make this more interesting, if we said the average salary of a VMware administrator was $80k USD (sort-of based on this article, and assuming that an VMUG leader will generally have more than 2 years of experience under their belt and will generally be in a senior-type role, the majority of VMUG leaders are in the US and salaries outside the US will obviously differ, but most VMUGs exist in well-developed 1st-word countries, rather than 2nd/3rd world emerging countries)

That would mean a VMUG leader globally earns an average of $318 per day before tax, multiply that out by the number of man-days given per year, that represents an opportunity cost that the VMUG leaders contribute to the VMware community & VMware itself of…..(drum-roll)

$622,470.12 USD.

Not too shabby 🙂 VMware, I hope you appreciate it 🙂

Anyways – just a bit of fun and not to be taken too seriously, but do go and hug a VMUG leader at your next meeting… (ok, don’t do that!)

**Yes, there are also many women who are VMUG leaders.. but man-days is an accepted term, and it’s shorter to type than person-years, apologies if it offends, it’s not meant to!