A day late, but yesterday I received some exciting news. NVIDIA announced the founding class of their new program, NVIDIA Community Advisors (or NCA for short).
What is the NCA Program you ask? I am glad you asked…
The program brings together the talents of individuals who have invested significant time and resources to become experts in NVIDIA products and solutions. Together, they give the entire NVIDIA GRID ecosystem access to product management, architects and support managers to help ensure we build the right products.
I am very excited about this program as I think the GPU is a critical component of a virtual workspace, be it published applications or virtual desktops. I believe these are becoming a crucial part and one day even a full requirement for enhancing and ensuring a solid end user experience and customer success. NVIDIA Grid has been a key part of my success with several recent projects for my customers. I am super proud and humbled to be including in the founding twenty members.
Please read the official release on the NVIDIA blog (follow it as well for GRID information)
Congratulations to the rest of the founding NCAs, give them a follow on twitter and their blogs, and a hearty congratulations.
- Durukan Artik – Dell, Turkey
- Barry Coombs – ComputerWorld, UK
- Tony Foster – EMC, USA, @wonder_nerd
- Ronald Grass – Citrix, Germany
- Richard Hoffman – Entisys, USA, @Rich_T_Hoffman
- Magnar Johnson – Independent Consultant, Norway, @magnarjohnsen
- Ben Jones – Ebb3, UK, @_BenWJones
- Philip Jones – Independent Consultant, USA, @P2Vme
- Arash Keissami – dRaster, USA, @akeissami
- Tobias Kreidl – Northern Arizona University, USA, @tkreidl
- Sean Massey – AHEAD, USA, @seanpmassey
- Andrew Morgan – Zinopy/ControlUp, Ireland, @andyjmorgan
- Rasmus Raun-Nielsen – Conecto A/S, Denmark, @RBRConecto
- Soeren Reinertsen – Siemens Wind Power, Denmark
- Marius Sandbu – BigTec / Exclusive Networks, Norway, @msandbu
- Barry Schiffer – SLTN Inter Access, Netherlands, @barryschiffer
- Kanishk Sethi – Koenig Solutions, India, @kanishksethi
- Ruben Spruijt – Atlantis Computing, Netherlands, @rspruijt
- Roy Textor – Textor IT, Germany, @RoyTextor
- Bernhard (Benny) Tritsch – Independent Consultant, Germany, @drtritsch
Twitter List of the founding NCA class
- https://twitter.com/rhbBSE/lists/ncas?lang=en NCA List by Rachel Berry of NVIDIA
- https://twitter.com/rspruijt NCA by Ruben Spruijt CTO of Atlantis Computing
Benefits of the NVIDIA Grid Program
Those selected for the program will be key technologists in the broader GRID customer and partner community. They’ll have the opportunity to work closely with and influence key engineering and business teams.
Other program benefits include:
- In-person meetings and private webinars with NVIDIA product teams for detailed discussions on current technologies and product roadmaps
- Special incentives to attend or speak at NVIDIA GTC and other events
- Access to a private forum for discussions with NVIDIA product teams about technologies, product updates, and priority technical support
- Monthly member conference calls with key product and development staff
- Access to demo licenses of current products and to early releases of future products
- Technical support contacts
A big thank you to NVIDIA and everyone that worked hard to make this program happen. I am a big proponent of community and these community based programs as they can be important to the feedback and development of the solution to meet customer’s needs in the future. I am also a member of the following community programs for Citrix (CTA), VMware (vExpert) and Cisco (Cisco Datacenter Champion) and I have seen these programs do great things for the greater community.
Last but not least Applications for the 2017 NVIDIA GRID Community Advisor program will open in January so watch the NVIDIA blog and watch the NCAs and twitter for more announcements around that time.
Just one more thing…
And a special thank you to Thomas Poppelgaard, you may not be in the first round of NVIDA NCA’s but i wouldn’t have half the knowledge of NVIDIA GRID and vGPU without your substantial work and contributions to the community. Thank you sir. Follow his blog, follow him on twitter. I cannot thank you enough for the work that you do for this community. My hat’s off to you sir.
