EMC World 2009 in Orlando and Beyond
On this blog, I try and refrain from getting too excited, but allow me to say - I love EMC World (which this year is May 18-21 in Orlando). It is probably my favorite work week of the year. Many of us spend up to six months preparing for this week of “the ultimate information exchange”. This will be my seventh year in a row going and I’d like to share a few tips for those that are attending and for those who can’t attend in person, to let you know how you can connect into what is going on.
Tip: If you are coming in person, wear comfortable shoes. The Orange County Convention Center in Orlando is huge - you will do a lot of walking and will likely be standing lots in the pavilion and while talking with others.
Why do I like EMC World so much? First of all, I really like to be able to share information. It’s pretty thrilling to be able to present a good technical presentation to a large audience that wants to soak it all in. During the rest of the year, I can meet with individual customers, partners or account teams, but the conference condenses into a single week what you couldn’t accomplish in most quarters. But more than my presentations, it is the debates and conversations between sessions, at the pavilion and everywhere else that are a highlight of the show. We’ve got some very passionate people that attend and the discussions tend to be great.
Tip: While the “swag” isn’t as plentiful as it was in the past, make sure you leave room in your bag for an extra shirt and some other trinkets that you can pick up from vendors. The raffles tend to have some great give-aways, it seems that the Flip video cameras are the hot item this year (if you haven’t already, check out the blogger’s lounge).
Food is covered at the conference for breakfast and lunch. There is food and drink at the Sunday welcome event featuring the Gin Blossoms. Monday evening has an event at the pavilion sponsored by EMC Select which will include plenty of food and drink (and make sure to stop by all of the vendor’s booths for special activities and give-aways). On Tuesday night, you’re on your own for dinner - this is also the night that you can expect to find a few sponsored parties (check the pavilion for invitations). On Wednesday night it’s Universal Studios which has some great rides, shops (where I’ll be sure to buy some Marvel superhero stuff for the kids) also includes food and drink.
Connecting beyond the conference
Last year for EMC World was when I first got on Twitter. There were only a handful of people that attended last year that were on Twitter; this year we expect a much larger contingency. Through blogs, I’ve seen attendees getting ready to attend EMC World from such far away places as Germany (@BasRaayman), India (@Apoorv) and NJ (@StorageNerve). If you are not able to attend the conference, there is still the opportunity to see some of the material. EMC will launch a microsite for the conference on Monday at http://www.emc.com/emcworld - this will include news, videos and photos of what is going on. If you’d like to hear even more of what is going on, you can “listen” to the conference on Twitter. You do not need a Twitter account; you can watch it on the web or via mobile browser. Point your browser to http://search.twitter.com and enter “emcworld” (or for a comprehensive listing, try this http://search.twitter.com/search?q=emcworld+OR+%22EMC+World%22). This will be the unfiltered messages of everyone who mentions the conference, so you’ll need to separate the signal from the noise. If you don’t want to have to separate the signal from the noise in the real-time feed, check out the EMC bloggers, many who will be posting about the conference.
In addition to sessions about virtualization, cloud and other great technologies, be sure to check out the EMC Community Network (ECN)
. This is the public site where you can connect with projects and people in the EMC Community. My group has a monthly Innovation Lecture Series which is hosted through the ECN site. Now we can continue to share and interact with many of the people that we see at EMC World throughout the year.
Hope to see you at the show or connect online. Thanks - Stu.
My session is Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), iSCSI and the Converged Data Center which will be offered at 4:30PM on Monday and 2:45PM on Wednesday
My blog: http://nohype.tumblr.com (if you like what you’re reading, please subscribe)
Twitter: @stu
