Joe Houghes is a Consulting Field Solutions Architect with Pure Storage, and he's a leader of the Denver Veeam, PowerShell, and VMware User Groups. Outside of work, he is the CTO of Dads of Castle Rock and their Community Outreach nonprofit.  He is also a certified Mental Health First Aid Instructor, who delivers the MFHA training for free to his local community, multiple user groups & tech conferences, and within Pure Storage.
He focuses on enterprise datacenter infrastructure, while automating us all out of low-level inefficiency and IT operations, and freeing everyone to focus on performing the higher-level tasks which actually deliver business value.

Joe wants every user to understand their infrastructure, workload platforms and the tools available to them, for the focus to make their jobs and non-work lives better. Everyone should be aware of the capabilities that they have, and use all of the resources that are available to make things easier, more secure, and resilient.

Joe believes automation should be a focus for admins & engineers, although it requires in-depth thinking beyond performing a task once. Even though it is not always someone's default method, the result is then repeatable and consistent.

Joe tries to help others understand why we should do the easy tasks better, and he challenges everyone to push themselves outside of their comfort zone and learn more about any topic of interest.Joe was the #1 speaker internationally for the VMware User Group from 2021 through 2024. In 2025, he instead created a demo for Pure Accelerate which showed how to convert all your VMware virtual disks to be able to easily import into Hyper-V, Nutanix, xcg-ng, Proxmox, and any other KVM/qemu based hypervisor.  He's absolutely a believer that your company's data is it's lifeblood and the most critical component which you need to be able to access wherever it makes sense to your business needs

He's a collector of communities as a leader for 3 User Groups, dual Microsoft MVP, vExpert & PRO, Cisco Champion, Veeam Vanguard, Tanzu Vanguard, plus a long time part of the vBrownBag crew. He works to encourage the next community speaker(s) to take his place, while helping get them started.  He also tells people not to let fear keep them from sharing their knowledge with others and teaching from their unique perspective.

You can spot him by the bright colored backwards hat, the big grin, and the loud "Howdy Y'all."