Because no one likes a “do over”

Seems to me that you can’t attend a seminar or presentation from any vendor or services company without the words “digital” and “disruption” featuring, often along with a slide reminding us that Uber is the largest taxi company in the world, with no taxis. I agree we are approaching, if not in the middle of, a tidal wave of change, made very evident by what I learned recently at Microsoft Ignite and Cisco Live. These two colossal organisations have found their very core shaken by change. Long gone are the attitudes of “protect Windows at all costs” and I’ll not repeat the comments about the now much-loved Linux. DDLS invests heavily to ensure we stay up-to-date with the thinking and products from organisations we work with, and to that end, we’ve been thinking a lot about Azure. We have a schedule of Azure events across the country, and trainers who can pretend not to be surprised when a new feature appears without fanfare. That is our disruption, no longer the three-year life cycle of a typical product with a service pack or two thrown in for good measure. I would argue that today training is more important than at any time in what I’ll call the technological revolution. Back in the day, a “do over” meant re-installing SBS on some new hardware; today, it might mean activating, architecting and managing cloud-based services that don’t exist now but might slip into production, well, now.

To that end, we are trying something new. A one-off event; if it’s successful we may well take it nationally, but for now we are launching this in Perth. What makes this different is we are solving three problems. Firstly, we have a global Azure “rock star” delivering the event for the technical audience; secondly, the event is also designed for developers; and thirdly, there is an optional companion event for the decision makers, the CIO, even the CEO, to attend. The aim is to ensure the technical and business leaders are all singing from the same feature-packed spreadsheet: an event that caters for Infrastructure Developers (let’s call it DevOps) and the CIO. That’s a new approach.

We know from the sessions we run, often one-to-one, for business leaders, there is a need to help jump-start their knowledge of Azure and the new paradigm that is off-premise computing. Check out the overview for the finer details, but before you do that, do you want to get your Azure implementation right? did you already do it right, or are you due a “do over”?

If you would like to attend in another location, let us know.

Gary Duffield