Wayne Sadin, host of the Future Office of the CXO channel on Acceleration Economy, shares his initial impressions and takeaways from last week’s Cloud Wars Expo, where he conducted interviews, ran a few sessions, and hosted the Industry Cloud Battleground on Financial Services (all of which you can watch on-demand starting July 20th).
Highlights
00:18 — Wayne just came back from a week in San Francisco, where he attended the inaugural cloud Wars Expo. “I had a terrific time,” he says. “My flights were on time, and the airports weren’t super crowded. I left two days early, to make sure I got there, and I got there when I was supposed to get there.”
00:58 — Wayne had two big impressions. First, we are in a multi-cloud, multi-network environment, where the cloud is now tipping the scales on on-premises and traditional technology.
01:09 — People mainly asked how to make all this fit together. “It wasn’t about ‘I decided to go do a little bit of cloud stuff, and how do I get started,’” Wayne explains. “It was ‘I’ve got clouds here, clouds there, clouds everywhere — clouds coming out of the woodwork. How do I hook them – multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, cloud management tools – together?” The cloud is the future, and people were there to see it.
01:34 — Second, the energy levels in the session rooms were high. Unlike attendees at most conferences, the people who came into the rooms at Cloud Wars Expo paid attention, took notes, and asked questions. There wasn’t a lot of drifting around, and people were on the show floor going to exhibits. They were engaged and enthusiastic, rather than standing on the sides on their phones or computers.
02:20 — After being cooped up and talking to people over Zoom and Teams, he thought it was terrific to have conversations in the hall, over a cup of coffee, or standing in front of a vendor booth with anyone who just happened to be walking by..
02:38 — Wayne reminds us that while he’s still a big proponent of work from anywhere (WFA), he also reiterates that there is no substitute for exchanging ideas in an unstructured way periodically. Cloud Wars Expo was an excellent exercise to show the world that the cloud is real, it’s here, and people want to talk to each other about it.
Want more tech insights for the top execs? Visit the Leadership channel:
