Day 2 IPEXPO 2014 Excel London
Before leaving home today I checked the weather forecast. It was mostly sunny and I thought it was a good omen. So there I was on my way to the second and last day of IPEXPO.
My resolution for the day was not to go to any of the talks in fear of the experience from the previous day.
I arrived “slightly” early at 8:00 o’clock when the gates would have opened at 9:30. At least that gave me time to catch up with some work and think of what I wanted to get from today’s visit.
It was still sunny when they finally let us in. I knew that today it would have been the last opportunity for exhibitors to get business cards and contacts from the visiting crowd. The race was on!
I got approached already by somebody right at the entrance 30 seconds before 9:30. First beep of the day. Just so that it is clear, each one of these exhibitors was equipped with a bar code reader and my badge had a bar code that would say who I was. So as you are talking to somebody you would see them more or less discretely pull one of those “weapons” out of their pockets and with nonchalance … they would beep you to death!
It was constant, you talk to somebody you get beeped, they give you a gadget but you get beeped, you go to a talk you get … beeped, you get stopped by somebody that actually asks you information and … you get BEEPED!! Well I guess you get it by now, there was no escaping.
As the hours passed it was rather entertaining to see visitors dodging pretty girls holding chocolate and gadgets in one hand and the dreadful weapon in the other. “Get a chocolate! Beep! mwahahaha”.
Then there were the freebies freaks. They are a different species, lurking in the shadow they wait until all exhibitors are busy with other visitors to launch themselves in an attach magpie style and get their object of desire. Which in itself is rather sad especially if you consider that since the credit crunch the freebies you get are along the lines of pens and sweets. Who uses that many pens nowadays anyway!
My determination not to go to talks paid off in the end. Getting from one exhibitor to another wasn’t easy but I eventually managed to have a good nearly old fashion chat with a few techies (yes they do still exist).
I had a really interesting chat with somebody from Ruckus which explained how different their antennas are from the competition and how does that guarantee a better coverage with less interference and eventually better bandwidth per user. Read this white paper for more.
My main goal for the day was to get more information on mobile users management for the enterprise and my best bets where Citrix and VMware’s latest acquisition Airwatch. The acquisition is so recent that the guys from VMware and the guys from Airwatch were actually in two different stands!
Both seem to be offering similar solutions but Citrix seemed to be able to offer a wider scope of functionalities. They were also the only ones that could explain a bit more of what really happens in the back-end, what services need to be deployed, how does the admin GUI looks like and gave a rather in depth explanation of what happens on the mobile device that wants to join … your private Cloud.
And so it ended. The first day was cloudy with a chance of content, the following day was dodge the beep but it was in fact more useful than the day before.
Am I going next year?