Years ago, when I was at HPE, the best Social Media guy I know (@CalvinZito) hosted a bunch of technical bloggers for a day to deep dive on all things storage. Fast forward and this week I found myself at the GestaltIT Cloud Field Day (#CFD3) with Stephen Foskett (@SFoskett), a concept which was born out of that humble beginning and which brings to mind images of 3-legged races or tug-of-wars (probably a vendor joke there somewhere).

This CFD was a reunion with storage bloggers like @chrismevans. I was co-presenting with other vendors including Oracle where I bumped into Leo Leung, another storage alumni. I even ran into @Stu Miniman from @Wikibon and @theCube fame who just happened to be in the neighborhood. It really is a small world… and one full of ‘@’ symbols.

It’s also a good picture of what’s happening in the industry at large. Legacy hardware businesses are declining as more enterprises shift from thinking about IT as how they managed ‘things’ to thinking about delivering new customer experiences and re-shaping markets. The ‘shift-left’ we talk about in DevOps circles is alive and well in the vendor and social media landscape.

This was our first Tech Field Day event and all-in-all I’d count it a success… the first couple of videos are a good product overview and demo of the core self-service functionality.

Companies like Nutanix and Nimble Storage kicked off their existence in social circles at past TFD events so not bad company to be in. Most of the audience was made up of infrastructure SMEs which biased the discussion a bit but that’s not unlike what we see with large customers. Developers pushing the infrastructure teams to change and act more like cloud providers.

These next videos get into more detail on governance and automation.

Many thanks to the #CFD3 delegates for the great interaction. Take a look at the sessions and drop me a note @MorpheusDude to let me know your thoughts or setup some time for your own demo and discussion. CFD3 delegates included @ChrisMEvans, @UprightVinyl, @FollowEstelle, @JeffWilsonTech, @JPWarren, @CTOAdvisor, @GreenReedTech, @M_Laverick, @Ned1313, @NickJanetakis, @OtherScottLowe, and @TCrawford