EMC World: Day 3 Recap
EMC WORLD: DAY 3 RECAP
Q: How can you tell a conference is a technical conference?
A: When the ratio of PDAs to attendee approaches 2 to 1.
The amount of IM, Twitter, SMS, email, and phone calls was amazing. All kinds of devices: iPhones, Qs, Nokias, and of course Blackberries. Lots of people doing the “Blackberry Prayer” with heads bowed and hands folded over the keyboard.
Important to engineers is their professional certification. Not only is this important in peer review, but for career purposes as well. The industry leading, award winning EMC Proven Professional program was on hand at EMC World. As I mentioned in my Twitter stream on EMC World, certification tests were being offered for half price during the show, and within the first two days 122 tests had been taken. They were expecting 250 total by the end of the week, with many new specialty certifications conferred for the first time.
Wednesday afternoon, on the main stage, the Proven Professional Awards were given. VP of EMC Education Services, Tom Clancy was on hand to launch and EMCee (pun intended) the ceremonies. Tom set the audience at ease by introducing himself humorously and presciently by saying “Hello, I’m Billy Crystal and welcome to the Academy Awards.”
Tom introduced Frank Hauk, EMC Executive VP and executive sponsor of the program spoke of the importance of this program in the industry and academia. He mentioned that the program has grown from 20K to 30K certified professionals in just one year. He also mentioned that EMC would continue to invest in the program. Last year’s awards at EMC World in Orlando were presented in a rather small room… that was overflowing. This year and into the future, the awards would be presented as a main event.
Alok Shrivastava, Senior Director responsible for the Proven Professional program awarded the Knowledge Sharing Awards — white papers on Best Practices in storage. He and Tom Clancy also awarded raffle prizes to the assembled Proven Professionals. They each had on their Proven Professional shirts, a light blue, not unlike the Science Division in the original Star Trek.
Web 2.0
One thing new this year is the amount of Web 2.0-style coverage of EMC World. The conference website itself uses a Flash-based “information growth ticker”, social networking opportunities, AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) based agenda builder… and links to EMC bloggers, some of whom are blogging about the show itself.
I’ve mentioned Twitter a few times. For the first time this year, Twitter has been used by attendees to “micro-blog” about EMC World in real-time. These posts, hash-tagged with “#emcworld” could be aggregated and sorted by a variety of tools, creating a virtual news stream. See my link at the bottom as an example.
On Wednesday, a special lunch gathering for those Twittering about EMC World was convened impromptu. And in a rather solipsistic manner, it was set up using Twitter. Half a dozen of us collected and spent an hour and a half discussing social media as a way to connect, enhance and improve communication with Partners and Customers.
Customers
One of the reasons customers attend is to save money, lots of money, on how they manage their information infrastructure. I spoke with one presenter who said he had spoken to a customer after his talk, and was able to show them how to consolidate in a way that would save them half a million dollars a month in energy costs.
Keynotes
On Wednesday, Mark Lewis, President of EMC’s CMA Division did a presentation on what’s coming from the Documentum division of EMC. He showed Knowledge Worker, using the Firefox browser, a powerful web-based tool for code and content development teams to create and manage custom enterprise applications The Web 2.0 integration was impressive. Also demoed were a variety of mashup, social networking and folksonomy tools. He discussed “Project Magellan”, which will be released in Q3 for free.
Thursday, Dr. Stephen Herrod, Chief Technology Officer of VMware offered a fascinating tour through VMware’s product stack, and a demo of the newly announced “Site Recovery Manager” which virtualizes an entire site for the purpose of automating the work flow of a “run book” in restarting a business in a remote site.
In conclusion
Q: How can you tell a conference is a technical conference?
A: Wednesday night, the show’s entertainment was Billy Crystal, Emmy winner, Tony winner, and past host of the Academy Awards ceremonies. He began the evening by greeting the room with:
“Good evening and hellooo nerds!
There are attendees here from 79 countries. It’s like being at Angelina Jolie’s house.
Nothing says Las Vegas like 7,000 engineers.”
A great conclusion to a great show.
By the way, I’ve reported more details via Twitter. These can be found in the news stream when you click here
Thanks for coming along,
© Bill Petro – visit the author for more great content.
