This blog was authored by Charles Buege and originally published on December 26, 2024.
First off, Fuel’s membership this year increased by almost 3200 people, bringing our total active user membership up to 9,257! With an increase of 52.6%, we have a goal next year to meet at least this same value, if not surpass it! If you know someone who could benefit from Fuel’s offerings, please pass the word along about the organization so they can join in and learn along with the rest of us!
The number of chapter events we had this year totaled a magnificent 82 held around the world! With a total of eight (8) Spark User Summits through the year, sixty-nine (69) individual chapter events, and the introduction of our new series called the “Fuel Workshops”, we had an additional five (5) events there as well. We hope to increase this even more for 2025 with a goal of hitting over 100 events across all types of chapters!
For those who aren’t familiar with the new Fuel Workshop events, let us tell you about them briefly. The Fuel Workshops are joint events between Fuel and members of the support team within Palo Alto Networks. These events are intended to introduce new customers and support personnel to the offerings within the Palo Alto Networks ecosystem. To date, we’ve talked about numerous topics including:
These are just some of what the Fuel Workshops have done and in the future, we will be covering more topics like SD-WAN, Panorama, and many, many other tools! While these events to date have centered around the timing of the SAGE chapter based out of Singapore, we are currently in the process of adding more instances of these same sessions to NAM and EMEA to be able to increase the reach of these great events to more people live so they can interact with the speakers as well. Please be sure to check these out!
We have restarted the blogs section of the Fuel user group. Several years ago, these articles were big offerings and greatly enjoyed by hundreds of people. By restarting this section, we’re hoping to get more input from other presenters, writers, and professionals that want to share their knowledge with everyone else. Knowledge is valuable, and sharing it benefits everyone. We are always on the lookout for anyone who would like to contribute, so please feel free to reach out to us at Fuel at fuel@fuelusergroup.org to tell us how you can help with the blogs! We’d love to have you!
Last, but certainly not least, would be the improvements we’ve made to the virtual test lab (VTL) that Fuel maintains. During this year, we’ve gone ahead and done a major overhaul to the entire system including the following changes/updates:
Coming in 2025, Fuel has more things that we are looking to implement and do beyond just the improvements to the VTL as mentioned above. Without giving away anything, we’re planning to do the following:
Thank you for taking the time to read what Fuel’s done in 2024 and here’s to getting even more done in 2025! We look forward to hearing from you!
The Fuel Team
fuel@fuelusergroup.org
