EMC World Day Three

The third official day of the conference started with an impressive keynote from Dr. Stephen Herrod, CTO of VMware.   Turnout was low — third day of a Vegas conference might not be the best time to speak to people at 8:30 AM.  But I was impressed with the consistency of the message.  From ESXi to VDI to VM Lab Manager, VMware is continuing to do exciting stuff.  I hope we continue to invest in using their technology at the office — we already make use of VMs for doing some development testing, but we’ve barely scratched the surface of what I saw on Tuesday.

I had to leave the keynote early, though, to begin prep for my busy day.  We delivered the ControlCenter handson twice on Wednesday, to lively crowds.  We got a lot of questions, and it was a bit frustrating getting deep-dive questions on topics I’m only marginally involved in if the expert happened to have stepped out of the room or had other engagements.  I really want to see us do better next year on this sort of thing.  At the same time I’d like to reevaluate how we gather data for ControlCenter Demo Edition.  Being able to hand-tailor the data to fit the use cases we want to demonstrate would go a long way.

I had lunch with the crew who were all twittering from the conference.  It was a varied group of employees, a partner, and an analyst.  We talked social media, corporate culture, company PR, the court of public opinion, and who knows what else.  It’s almost cliche that a group of twitterers having a conversation would be unable to focus on a single topic but would launch into many short mini-conversations, but that’s what happened.

After lunch, I blew off walking the show floor for the last time to update my internal blog at EMC.  I’m not sure what that says about where this sort of activity falls in my personal priority list, but I have a few guesses.

After the second ControlCenter handson of the day we got to see Billy Crystal in the main event arena.  He was surprisingly funny, though I’m sure having a well-lubricated crowd (when the bartenders don’t even look up from their continuous beer-pouring there’s sure to be some cheerful folks).  With the hardest part of the conference behind us, we continued on to New York, New York and enjoyed a little bit of the Vegas nightlife.

Like I said in a previous post, this trip is a definite perk, but there’s more work than you’d think.