Top 5 ONUG Community Member Benefits

Why Should YOU, as an IT Professional, Become an ONUG Community Member?

At a recent ONUG Board meeting, members shared that vendors are offering a 40 to 70% consideration/discount on infrastructure products and services when the vendor realizes they are an ONUG Community member. I was surprised to hear this. Others were surprised to hear that they were not the only ones receiving these discounts. Also surprising is that the discounting was not just from one vendor but from multiple vendors. This prompted a pretty healthy discussion about what is driving this new relationship between the vendor community and ONUG Community members? It all came down to one thing: ONUG eliminates disaggregation of IT executives by enabling them to come together. Here are the top five benefits for IT professionals to be plugged into the ONUG Community.

  1. Discounts on infrastructure products and services of 40 to 70%: Being a member of the ONUG Community and showing it during one-on-one vendor meetings by wearing ONUG badges, laptop labels and using the ONUG mock RFPs affirms that you are part of the growing community of IT executives. During the ONUG Conference Fireside Chats, open exclusively to IT executives, you’ll hear best practices to leverage the ONUG brand to get favorable IT pricing. Showing your ONUG affiliation communicates that you are not isolated and have access to IT executive peers to assure you are getting the best deal for IT products and services.

  2. ONUG RFP it: At ONUG Spring 2018, ONUG is kicking off a campaign called “ONUG RFP it.” This campaign’s goal enables the ONUG Community to RFP the working group use case requirements so that the vendor communities see these requirements in the field. The more the requirements are requested by the community, the greater the chance that they will be built and offered. This campaign will include mock RFPs, written by ONUG IT executive community members, and will be available for download at onug.net. The “ONUG RFP it” buttons will be distributed at ONUG Spring and worn by community members. This will be one of the top three messages of ONUG Spring and will be a compelling way to put the collective $100B annual IT buying power of the ONUG Community behind the working group requirements. ONUG RFP it communicates that you and your company are active members of the ONUG Community, putting its power of the collective purse behind your IT purchases and getting the best possible deal too.

  3. New Skills: Ever since the PC era, the vendor community has been aligned into market-segmented silos; that is, there are storage, networking, compute, cloud, application, security, etc., firms. IT professionals aligned with those industry silos and struck allegiance with particular companies within those silos. But this siloed industry structure is being disrupted with massive technology changes and so, too, are the IT organization, culture and skill sets. The software-defined cloud era at ONUG is all about IT as solution integrators that stitch together products and open source code from multiple sources to deliver a desired outcome. Every IT organization is struggling with not having the right skills to adapt to these changes and implement IT projects. At ONUG Academy, you and your staff can gain new skills and make yourself more valuable in today’s IT market place.

  4. Strongest Social Network: The larger and stronger your social network, the more successful you will be. As the saying goes, “it’s not what you know but who you know.” One of the biggest advantages of being in the ONUG Community is the people you meet and get to know. ONUG by definition is a network of IT executives and industry leaders. By attending ONUG, you get plugged into the ONUG network that you can lean on to open doors, seek advice and share professional experiences.

  5. New Thinking Education: The ONUG Community is a peer permission structure, meaning that you learn more from peers than you do from analysts, consultants, vendors, etc. When market-leading companies that are part of the ONUG Community start to deploy a container orchestration strategy that stretches across private to multiple clouds then you feel more comfortable that you and your company can do the same. All the invited speakers at ONUG come because they want to share and educate the community on new thinking in IT delivery and hear others’ experiences.

So, that is the ONUG Board’s value proposition to be an ONUG Community member. You will get better and deeper discounts on IT products and services than those who are not a member of the community. You’ll also put the full buying power of the community behind your purchases, thanks to “ONUG RFP it”. You’ll gain new skills, increase your career value and strengthen your professional social network. You’ll tap directly into ONUG’s peer permission structure that will share with you, new thinking and education on how to navigate IT’s transition into the digital economy.  

Join the community this spring in San Francisco on May 8th and 9th at UCSF at Mission Bay, and start your ONUG Community journey.  

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