Adapt 2.0: BlueCat’s Virtual User Group

What brings together network IT professionals from America, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland? Hint: it’s not a network outage.

BlueCat has hosted user groups in major cities throughout North America. But when our customers span from large metropolitan areas to smaller cities throughout the world, we needed a creative way to bring the user group experience to them.

Adapt 2.0 is our first virtual customer user group and hosted customers from all around the world. From 14 different countries, BlueCat customers joined the online event to learn how to adapt to the biggest disruptor in their industry: cloud.

Cloud seems to ignite more questions than it does answers, and we get that. Much of the agenda was designed to help our customers maximize their cloud investment, whether they’re considering cloud, moving to cloud, or already there.

Jason Davis, Senior Director of BlueCat Expert Team, kicked off the day with a session called “Designing a DNS Cloud Strategy.” Using four use cases to frame the strategy, he addressed cloud visibility, provisioning IP addresses with cloud DNS, securing hybrid cloud environments with DNS, and managing native cloud DNS.

For BlueCat users, they were equipped with the tactical knowledge to integrate with their cloud teams better. Too often the network team is left in the chaos that the cloud team unknowingly created. Bridging that gap limits the risk organizations face when adapting cloud technology, and helps the network team sleep a little better at night.

Another agenda highlight, came from Bill Morton, Director of Professional Services, Integrations & Automation. His session “Cloud & Automation” brought together two of the industry’s most current topics. On the theme of getting the most value from your cloud, Bill showed BlueCat users how they can leverage the cloud for automation.

As valuable as our sessions were, nothing compares to the power of a community. BlueCat users have exclusive access to BlueCat VIP, a Slack community just for them. Keeping up with the conversation during the virtual user group was a challenge in itself. (But we can’t complain about engaged customers!) From sharing their latest Gateway workflow to getting insight on how other network teams tackle similar problems, the BlueCat VIP community supports users and helps them get the most value from their investment with us.

Plus, we get gems like this.