Databricks hosted their Data + AI World Tour event in Chicago on October 3rd, and with all of the hype around AI, Generative AI and Large Language Models, this was the perfect place to get a feel for what is going on.
All in Shows
Highlights from Chicago Tech Week 2023
July 10th through the 14th Chicago hosted the Chicago Tech Week, which were a series of events across the city with a trade show at Navy Pier on the 13th.
Quick update on the event. More interviews to come from folks we met there.
HPC + AI Wall Street 2022 Update #96
Sandesh and I went to the HPC + AI Wall Street conference where friend of the show Ryan Quick was a featured speaker. There were a bunch of sessions focusing on everything from Quantum computing and Neuromorphic computing to Artificial Intelligence and Big Data. The show was run by Tabor communications that is the publisher of HPC Wire, Datanami, and EnterpriseAI to name a few.
Update from VMware Explore 2022
To start with, VMware Explore was held in San Francisco at the Moscone center. Not sure this was a great decision. They may have felt if they stay local, more companies will be interested in sponsoring, and exhibiting. For everyone not from the bay area, it was very expensive. Hotels were at a premium for sure. San Francisco is also dealing with a bit of a crime crisis at the moment, which has been getting a lot of news coverage.
#30: Reinventing Yourself During a Pandemic with Nick Tasler
Today we are going to be talking about re-invigorating your career during a Pandemic with Organizational Psychologist Nick Tasler who appeared in Podcast #9 back in May of 2020.
When we first talked with Nick Tasler in May of last year, he was trying to figure out what he was going to do when the events industry went into lockdown effectively ending his work as a keynote speaker. We talked about pivoting, and Nick made a great pivot.
#27: Building Epic Events in Surreal, with Surreal Events CEO, Josh Rush
Those of you who know me know I like a good turn around story and I have a great one for you today. When the pandemic struck, it hit the events industry particularly hard. Our partner for the eMERGE 2020 Chicago event, Echelon Design felt the impact immediately, seeing a drastic reduction in engagements with no clear end in sight.
#1: Out of an abundance of caution, With Adam Voss From Surreal Events - Part 1
We talk about some of the technology challenges in light of the ever expanding Coronavirus epidemic. Appearing on the show are:
Chris Brandt: FUTRtech.org
Sandesh Patel: FUTRtech.org
Adam Voss: 12for12.com, echelondesign.com, adamvoss.com
eMERGE 2020 Chicago Postponed
COVID-19 Update
First we would like to thank all the sponsors of eMERGE 2020 Chicago, you are true partners in bringing this show to life and we appreciate your involvement. Many of you have inquired about our plan for the COVID-19 virus outbreak. Additionally, many of our sponsors have informed us of travel restrictions that have been put in place by their companies. This outbreak has had a significant impact on tradeshows around the world. Many shows have gone virtual or been cancelled.
eMERGE 2020 Chicago Preview
Welcome back, I’m sure you have talk about eMERGE 2020 Chicago conference here. So what the heck is it you may be asking. This is a technology culture conference. Chicago has so many great components to make it a great technology hub, but it has failed to really take off as a technology center. I think part of that is because of the cultural aspect.
Back during the dotcom boom, Chicago had a great technology culture, but after the crash, that kind of disappeared. In the valley, the roots of technology had taken hold, but here, they weren’t as deep and they got washed away in the crash.
Re:Invent 2019 Part 2
As I mentioned in Part 1, attendance was high. Now in its 8th year, Re:Invent had the capacity for 65,000 with over 3,000 sessions.
This year, “Transformation” was the main theme. The main take away was that you should be moving more aggressively to the cloud. Andy Jassy in his keynote kept coming back to this theme, and much of it was aimed at senior leadership. He laid out some key points to accelerating the journey.
Re:Invent 2019 Part 1
Hi Everyone, this is Chris Brandt with another AWS Re:Invent update. Before I get started I just wanted to say, if you enjoy these videos, please like and subscribe, click the bell to get notifications when I post new content. I usually do that at the end, so I thought I would try it up front for a change.
AWS Re:Invent was held once again in Las Vegas Nevada. This show has grown so large, there are few cities that can house it. Re:Invent this year had capacity for 65,000 attendees, and by all accounts they were pretty close to maximum capacity. The show spanned 6 properties in Las Vegas, and rumors have it that they are going to be adding in Mandalay Bay next year in an attempt to hit 80,000 in attendance which is absolutely mind-blowing.
AWS Re:Invent 2019 Interviews - Instana and Infinidat
Managing complex environments has always been tricky, and having good tools to provide you with actionable information is invaluable. When you start talking about cloud native applications and micro services, this challenge is magnified.
I have always felt that Application Performance Monitoring tools are very under deployed. They can be such an invaluable tool to IT, but the value proposition has often been hard to translate up the chain to CFOs. While there isn’t a direct line to greater profits, reducing the time to resolution or proactively addressing problems can have enormous value. In a micro services world, having some sort of APM in place is simply a requirement.
AWS Re:Invent 2019 Interviews - Fivetran and Perimeter81
We all know the story that data is a strategic asset and this is causing companies to become IT organizations at their core. Companies are also increasingly leveraging SaaS applications. Companies now often have hundreds of SaaS vendors. With all of this comes data sprawl.
Since data is critical to organizations now, collecting and analyzing that data is key, but that can be a challenge when the data lives on many different platforms in many different forms, so bringing all of it together into a data warehouse can be hard.
NetApp Insight 2019 Part 2: Interview with Igneous and Cleondris
A lot of the show floor was taken up by NetApp itself. The show floor was divided into different sections. Some for the Partner community, some focusing on their products and some focusing on specific use cases. And there were areas devoted to play and areas to relax.
Like other shows this year, there has been a focus on Social Media, which mostly involves tracking Twitter feeds talking about the company and show. I probably need to get plugged in with these folk a bit more.
NetApp Insight 2019: Part 1
NetApp held their annual Insight conference in Las Vegas again this year. There is always a lot going on in Vegas, and there were several shows in town. There was a Crypto Currency conference happening in my hotel. I can only imagine what kind of shenanigans a bunch of risk taking crypto math geeks could get up to in this town.
There were not a lot of new product announcements this year, it seemed to be more focused on delivering of promises previously made. This is not a bad thing. This is an opportunity to refocus on the fundamentals of the business and realizing their multi-could/hybrid-cloud data fabric story.