Last week I attended HP Discover. Well, after the long week and a deserved weekend with the family, it’s time to write a recap and some considerations about the event.
It’s massive
Almost 12.000 people for a single vendor show is huge, an incredible number of sessions (well divided in informative, technical and hands-on labs). The expo area was also big, actually big enough to show all the HP products with plenty of demo sessions and engineers ready to show you products and solutions. Some showroom space was also dedicated to some partners.
I think that if you are (or a wanna-be) HP customer/partner this event is the best to keep in touch with the people that are developing the products you use on a daily basis!
It’s informative
I attended few public sessions, HP arranged many interesting meetings and twettups for bloggers and the time to jump into sessions wasn’t enough. The good thing is that the few sessions I visited were very well presented, even if the message was biased (it couldn’t be different in such an event) it was very informative!
I also visited the HP Labs and HP Technology showcase booths, I found them extremely pleasant and useful to take a look at the imminent future products of the company.
It isn’t perfect
Everything perfect? Actually, I didn’t like some of the keynotes and also Meg Whitman was below my expectations, at times flat. It’s likely, she took a very balanced stance because of the future reshuffling (aka layoffs), who knows?
I also found some incoherence on the cloud strategy: They call it converged cloud but I found a lot of confusion and at least three different approaches of thinking cloud.
Fortunately, this “cloud strategy” will evolve soon and future roadmaps (from a product standpoint) will really converge is some way (on Openstack).
Bottom line
If you are a partner or customer of HP this is your event, for sure! It’s not cheap but this is a real window on HP world where you can see what they are doing and where they are going. It deserves a visit!
I admit that it was good for me too, as an independent blogger it’s very helpful to talk to all these HP managers and techies all together in a single location.
Once again, I hope than the future HP Discover events will be improved on the keynotes messaging, a little bit more of bravery and innovation wouldl be the icing on the cake!
Disclaimer: I was invited at this meeting by HP and they paid for travel and accommodation, I have not been compensated for my time and am not obliged to blog. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any other person than the Juku’s team.
