Often times at large conferences, the keynote presentations and booths offer high-level strategy and marketing material but not much substance for the actual engineers and developers implementing the technology itself. vBrownBag, an educational podcast for the information technology sector, has been addressing this void by setting up more technically focused sessions at these conferences, as well as videocasting tech deployment livestreams.

“vBrownBag is … a podcast that’s about education for the practitioner of IT [information technology], the person working in data centers or designing solutions to go into data centers,” said Alstair Cooke (pictured), chief video officer of vBrownBag Ltd. “We have an open stage for those same IT practitioners, the hands-on engineering people to come and share the things they’ve learned with the rest of the community.”

Cooke spoke with host Stu Miniman (@stu) and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer) of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the recent VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed what vBrownBag provides for it’s enthusiastic IT practitioners viewers.

Hands-on technology education

One of vBrownBag’s latest offerings is a livestream of deploying new technology from scratch, called “Build Day,” which shows the day-one engineer experience of implementing a piece of technology. Cooke usually works directly with a technology’s vendor to set up the product deployment. 

“A lot of vendors say, ‘Our technology is going to be very easy,’ so we put them to the test on that,” Cooke said. “We deploy whatever the technology is — be it the hyperconverged platforms, storage platforms, management platforms — and we livestream that process.” 

The type of people who attend vBrownBag sessions and consume their content are everyday, hands-on IT practitioners looking to either improve their skill sets or build from scratch, Cooke explained.

“We’ve got this whole heap of forward thinking, telling the infrastructure people these are the skills you’re going to need to be relevant in the future. If the cloud is eating your lunch in your data center, here’s a whole set of skills that you’re going to need in order to be able to learn,” Cooke concluded. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE