Summary: Executive Summary: We're back after a few weeks attending some of the big IT conferences in North America. Mike recaps TechEd and Cisco Live. What were the common, recurring themes? What were the highlights and lowlights? How do these observations relate to experience that John and Tom have seen? Hosts: John Kresic, Tom Kresic, Mike Kresic Running Time: 40:51 IT Pro Main Topic: Tech Conference Recaps Microsoft TechEd 2014 (Houston) First time they merged MMS and TechEd into one event. It was crowded. Too big for the George Brown Conv Ctr. Conspicuously, they did not have an announcement about 2015 conference, to quell the rumors that they were discontinuing the conference. Pretty clear they are developing for cloud first. No on-premises product releases or announcements All about Azure. Rossinovich admitted they have an oscillating rhythm at work for melding features into products. can deliver much faster to the Azure/cloud versions. Buttons and positions of features are changing all the time Disappointed that they were so insistent in presuming you are all MSFT. Lots of SAN bashing in favor of Storage Spaces. You’d never hear them mention VMware or Xen, except in the sessions where they tried to “objectively compare” them to HyperV. Cisco Live 2014 (San Francisco) 25th anniversary of the conference (used to be called Networkers) 25,000 people in attendance at the Moscone and Marriott Marquis Cloud was the drinking word this year. Also “internet of everything” and “software defined networking”. Cisco plans to be #1 in this. Interestingly, they also claim to be #1 in “Cloud” John Chambers keynote: very ambitious. forecasted drastic and dire consolidation in the tech industry Mike participated in the management track. Many disappointments about how this was executed. Good session on service catalogs. traditional “keep the lights on” budget model: Think like a service provider. act like a service operator and broker. Defining IT Services - Common Mistakes (Cisco on 4th or 5th iteration of their catalog. been doing this for five years)
