I had an interesting chat with Bob Plumridge of SNIA whilst at SNW-Europe where we discussed the differences between the European organisation and the US organisation; possible directions for the Academy events and SNW-Europe and what we want to see from the industry organisation.
There are significant differences between the US and the European SNIA organisations; SNIA in the US is a fairly inward looking organisation, focusing very much on the development of standards and discussion between vendors, whereas the European organisation is generally more outward looking and focused on the education aspects. Educating end-users about technology concepts and trends but in a way which does not focus on one vendor or another.
I’ve only ever attended SNW Europe and not its sister conference in the US but the comments I have heard from people are that the European event gets a lot more end-users and is less of a industry networking event. This should mean that it has more value and attendance is certainly up.
But it may be time for it to change again or at least evolve so that it maintains value. Here are some of my thoughts which I shared.
1) Education sessions seem to be aimed at a relatively low-level of assumed knowledge. There might be scope for a more advanced track.
2) Perhaps cover areas which although not traditionally storage but do have applicability to us; for example the legal obligations with regards to data security and especially with regards to locality of data when storing in a cloud infrastructure.
3) Birds of the Feather sessions; where like minded storage folks can talk about the things which are impacting them and their businesses.
4) Ensuring that we have good attendance from some of the more interesting start-ups.
The vendor neutral presentations are good but they only go so far; I do wonder if it might be allowable to let the vendor who has just struggled through a presentation to either take questions and not having to be completely neutral in their answers or allowing them a five minute lightning pitch at the end of a presentation.
Or perhaps have a session which is just lightning pitches? Or a vendor balloon-debate?
I think as an event, it’s good but at times it takes itself too seriously. It could perhaps do with a fun side as well…what would you like to see?
I do like the vendor neutral presentations although a lot of times the presenters have a very hard time keeping the neutral hat on. Most of the big vendors have their own events these days so it’s a nice change to be able to escape and focus on the technology concepts only.
But then again I strongly agree with your point 1). Over the course of the two days I’ve heard the same topics at the same (low) level over and over again. I’d love to see more avdanced tracks for those of us that have been in the industry for a while (even if we need to give up the vendor neutral stuff for that). I’m sure a lot of people would agree.
I think often the vendor neutralness of the presentation neuters some of the presentation. Even if it was a case that they were allowed 5 minutes to discuss why they did something..I think there might be some value.
IMHO you are absolutely right about the level. I don’t want to be treated like I don’t even know what a cloud or what virtualization is in almost every single presentation. So your suggestions sound very interesting for me.
I’ve never been quite sure if tech neutral necessarily makes sense, simply because implementation strategies vary. Dedupe I’ve seen done in quite a range of different ways – block level, variable segment, volume level vs. ‘whole array’ and inline vs. post processes.
So what I’d suggest is ‘fight club’ – get two vendors with competing technologies to put forward the use cases in which theirs is the better offering, and explain why. That’s particularly the case when they’re taking on the same problem, but using different approaches.
I’m not really convinced about the ‘vendor neutral’ nature of the presentations, certainly not some of the ones I attended at SNW. At the same time, having attended plenty of vendor presentations during the year, they weren’t ‘that bad’. Would removing the restriction actually improve the situation though or would it just turn into a 30 minute competitor attacking, model plugging pitch?
‘Fight club’ – sounds like an excellent idea, a return to a real battle of champions! (Blood on the conference floor?)