The Symform team is back in the office, having survived a week in New York City and the Javits Center for Cloud Computing Expo East. While we are moving a bit slowly and feeling the jet lag, it was a good week of discussions, presentations, food and drink, and awareness building.
In the spirit of our Top 5 Friday blog, we came up with our top five favorite interactions of the week, which are in addition to the dozens of conversations we had at our booth every day.
1. Our presentation on Distributed and Decentralized Cloud
Had a great turn out Monday night for our presentation. Started out a bit rough with the guy before us running 10 minutes long, and then I brought up an older version of our deck – but it went well in spite of that. Also, great questions from the audience. Good to see that IT folks are open to looking at distributed and decentralized models whether with a private or public cloud environment. Here’s our presentation:The Distributed & Decentralized Cloud
2. Praerit’s Interview with TMCnet
Our president and co-founder, Praerit Garg, did a great job chatting with the folks from TMCnet at the booth. Praerit discussed how the economics are broken in today’s cloud storage market, with cloud storage costing so much more than external local hard drives, and how Symform is disrupting the cloud storage and backup market with our peer-to-peer approach. The video is already posted on TMC’s site at: http://www.tmcnet.com/tmc/videos/default.aspx?vid=6559&title=Symform+cloud+storage+interview
3. Cloud Camp
Tuesday night, Symform sponsored Cloud Camp, a great organization that puts on these unconferences all over the world. I gave a lightening talk on Decentralized Cloud Storage to a full room of attendees, who probably enjoyed the good munchies and open bar! Thanks to @bigdataexpo for taking a photo of my presentation!
4. Cloud Bootcamp
By Thursday, the voice and the energy were starting to go, but I was up early to join the Cloud Boot Camp, hosted by cloud guru Larry Carvalho @robustcloud. We had the early morning slot, kicking off the boot camp at 8:15 with a talk on Extending your infrastructure and data to the cloud.
Extending Your Infrastructure & Data to the Cloud
5. Podcast with Digital Nibbles and CloudNOW
I sat down with a couple other Cloud Network of Women peeps and the folks at Digital Nibbles for a radio interview on the cloud, women in technology, big data, and whatever else we came up. Thanks to Wendy White of Tier 3, another awesome Seattle-based cloud company, and Mary Beth Borgwing of Standish Corp.
There were other interactions I should also mention, including my favorite tweet of the week by Paul Mooney @moon – who really captured my love of caffeine and gluten-free diet state of mind: “@seattledawson Fueled only by coffee and no carbs for #cloudexpo#bootcamp - Extending your infrastructure & data to the cloud.”
And a special shout out to Symform partner and reseller Gary Jackson of Certainty Tech Telecom out of Pittsburg, who did booth duty with us on Thursday. Also to the folks in nearby booths with whom we enjoyed conversation, jokes, food and whining, especially the guys at Nimble Storage and ComputeNext. And thanks to NetSuite for giving me a football to throw around during off hours!!
Next time you’re in NYC and near Javits and looking for great food, I can highly recommend the HK Hell’s Kitchen restaurant. The hangar steak was awesome as was the wine.
Finally, and I hate to end on a down note, but my least favorite interaction was with the woman who came by the booth during the lunch break and started tossing about ten of our cloud stress balls into her bag until I stopped her. However, other than that, Cloud Expo was a great show!
