Microsoft Cloud Summit a Success!
Posted on July 11, 2012 by Chris Koenig
Yesterday Microsoft hosted our first ever Microsoft Cloud Summit in Dallas, TX. Run locally by our DPE team here in Dallas, and supported by our peers throughout Central Region, we hosted 365 developers and IT Pros from all over TX, OK, AR and LA. The topic of conversation: Windows Azure and Cloud Computing on the Microsoft Platform. For a first-time conference like this, in this town, on a topic like Cloud Computing, I have to admit that I’m pretty pleased with the outcome. Although it’s easy to say that we’d love to have more people attend, I think that the combination of a July event and the fact that it was July in Texas during the week of Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto still didn’t take away from what turned out to be an amazing experience.
The event started off with a Keynote from none other than Scott Guthrie, Corporate VP for Windows Azure, and the closest thing that Microsoft has to a true Rock Star. He gave an overview of the new features released during the Windows Azure Spring Release this past June. LOADs of great stuff in there, but I’m becoming increasingly interested in the Service Bus and Caching capabilities – will have to play more with those…
Other sessions of the day included a great mix of developer and IT professional content, which you can download online, including:
- Clint Edmonson: Windows Azure Virtual Machines
- Brian Prince: Windows Azure Web Sites and the Web API
- Mike Benkovich: Connecting Windows 8 Applications with Windows Azure
- Adam Hoffman: Windows Azure Building-block Services
- John Weston: What’s New with Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V 3
- Keith Mayer: Building a Private Cloud with System Center 2012
During lunch, we held a Q&A session with Scott called “Grill the Gu” where we invited attendees to tweet questions to Scott using the #GrillTheGu hashtag, so that he could alternate between answering live questions from the audience and those tweeted in earlier during the keynote. I lost track of how many questions we were able to get through, but we definitely had some great ones come through, and some great conversations in the answering.
In addition to all the great content and presentations, we had five of our local area partners participate in the event by setting up display tables and chatting with folks all day long at our Partner Pavilion. As an added bonus, each partner got 5 minutes at the beginning one of the sessions to present their success stories around Windows Azure. I got a lot of positive feedback about their participation in the event, so future events will probably continue to include invitations to partners. Partners participating in the Partner Pavilion included:
The most important part of a conference like this, of course, is to make sure that the people attending enjoyed and learned from what they saw. I’m happy to say that across all of the evaluations we received, our sessions scored an average attendee rating of 8.4 out of 9, which is absolutely fantastic! People enjoyed the presentations, and felt like they got a lot of valuableinformation out of them.
I had a great time working with these guys, and many others to make this event successful. If you enjoyed the event, be sure to let us know – and definitely indicate what you’d like to see in the future! All in all, a spectacular event that I hope we can repeat some day in the future. Maybe we’ll have a Microsoft Cloud Summit 2013? I will see if I can find some money to do just that…
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[...] night before Scott Guthrie keynoted the (mindblowing) Microsoft Azure conference I attended on 7-10-2012, I wrote this down: Scott,I know you meet many people across the world [...]