Before talking more about Las Vegas, I really must cover more of why I was there in the first place. HP Discover is HP’s big conference, covering everything HP sells. And it turns out that HP has a lot to sell. Laptops, printers, servers, storage, network, software – and software is a huge portfolio of variably integrated products. Plenty of demos and equipment, but more importantly, highly skilled people to talk to. No mucking around with booth babes – they had solid technical resources on hand. 11,000 attendees, a massive showroom floor, general sessions, hundreds of breakout sessions, there was a lot to cover.
Due to the nature of my role, and my interests, there was a lot I wanted to cover – software and networking related mainly, but then it was remarkably easy to get distracted by things like the 3PAR storage announcement. That’s before you get into long discussions with engineers from HP Labs – this was a really mind expanding conversation, talking about longer term trends in the industry. These guys aren’t worried about next quarter’s numbers, or making the server go 5% faster, or putting in 5% more storage. They’re thinking about the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years. They’ve got products that they’re working on that have the potential to dominate the industry, if they come off. It’s great to see that a company is doing more than just gluing chips on a board, or putting stickers on a tin. Their optical backplane switches, and memristor technology could become products worth billions over decades.
I was a late addition to the Bloggers group at HP Discover. HP had organized special events for independent bloggers, as well as providing a dedicated area with tables, power points, etc. I didn’t make the full use of this though – I was too busy out and about talking to people. The owner of my company says he’d rather send senior people to conferences than on training courses. He’s right too – courses are fine for learning a specific product, but you can’t beat talking to a wide range of people for exchanging ideas on broader industry trends, and trying to work out which direction you need to move in. You can read a manual to find the specific product knowledge. The bigger challenge is trying to work out which products you should be looking at in the first place. Establishing contacts is critical too, not just for right now, but as part of your longer term career.
In addition to the regular attendees, HP had 160 CIOs from various companies in attendance. Not surprisingly, they were being looked after well, directed to all the right places, given the better treatment, etc. How were they identified? They had a wide white lanyard for their conference pass. All the other lanyards were blue. So if you knew what you were looking for, you knew who you should be nice to. Well, somehow I ended up with a CIO pass. I didn’t actually realize what the difference was at first. Initially I didn’t see ANY other white lanyards, and I was wondering what was going on. Then I started getting directed around: “This way sir, there’s some reserved seating at the front of the keynote session.” “Are you looking for the CIO breakfast sir? Right this way sir.” Hmmm. I was also wondering why I was getting extra attention from vendors and product managers. I’m sure they were nice to everyone, but I seemed to get extra attention. It wasn’t until later I found out about the CIO group. Perhaps I should have tried to take more advantage of it. But what could I do? I already got free food and drink. The only thing I regretted not taking advantage of was the priority seating at the Sheryl Crow/Don Henley concert. No matter, I had good seats for that anyway. I think there’s going to have to be a third post covering Las Vegas outside of the conference itself. The closing night concert fits better into that post I think.
Highlights of the conference for me included:
* Bloggers dinner on Monday night – a great chance to meet quite a few of the independent bloggers, from around the world. Far-ranging conversation, only briefly touching on HP-related matters. Accompanied by good food, and wheat beer. Doesn’t get much better.
* Meeting the architect of the current generation of Operations Agents, and getting to tell him what I really thought about them (Hint: not much. How can you screw up simple software that you’ve been working on for over a decade?)
* Spending time with a bunch of intelligent people, talking as technical as we liked. Don’t always get a chance to do that at home!
The scale of the conference organization is worth mentioning too. If you’re used to these big conferences, and you visit Las Vegas 6 times per year, it’s nothing out of the ordinary. But when you’re from New Zealand, and you attend conferences like Kiwicon (superb conference by the way), then this is on a completely different scale. All those attendees, all the exhibits, all the breakout sessions means that it covers a huge area, and it needs an army of staff to keep it all ticking over. Thousands of people being fed and watered – and yet I never had to wait for food. Superb range, and you could forget you’re basically in the middle of the desert. Many, many different rooms – yet I never had trouble getting around, staff were always on hand. The only problem was that it was a bloody long walk from the Blogger lounge, across the showroom floor, down the hallway, and up the 3 floors to where all the iMC sessions seemed to be held! So many times I seemed to be saying “This is a fantastic conversation, but I’m really sorry, I have to get going to another session.” Later in the week, I realized I didn’t need to go to the general sessions – too general – so I could carry on those conversations.
All up, it was one of the best events I’ve been to. There’s a heap of technical things I found out about, but I need to do more research on those. When I do write up that stuff, it will probably be elsewhere. Don’t think it’s fair to subject my normal readers to that!