I was excited to receive an invitation to a Tech Field Day event in Austin, Texas. It’s a long way from my home in Brisbane, Australia, but so worth the trip. Here’s what to expect and how to watch.
Tech Field Day 101
Started by Stephen Foskett, Tech Field Day is a completely unique concept. The TFD events bring together a bunch of about 10 smart technical people from all over the world, and sit them down in front of the top tech companies and startups. The presenting companies have a 2 hour timeslot to talk, while the panel of delegates ask questions, take notes and spread their work on social media. They are told to bring their best technical presenters, not their sales team! We all wear microphones and the presentations are live streamed and recorded so anyone can watch them. TFD 16 is a “general” event, where the presenting company can be from any aspect of tech. Tech Field Day also runs specialized events on storage, networking, wireless, data, virtualization & Cloud, and “Extra” events at major tech conferences.
Delegates will do some homework on presentation topics before the event and will often blog their thoughts afterwards. All of the delegates have a community or social media presence or blog.
Who’s presenting at TFD16?
On Wednesday, February 20th at 10:00am CST, we’ll be in the Solarwinds office, for an overview of their core products and some updates. Solarwinds has a great online community so I’m looking forward to meeting some online celebrities in real life, and hearing more about the technical details of their products.
Wednesday at 3:00pm there’s a secret company presenting, so you’ll just have to watch the livestream for that announcement!
Thursday starts at 08:00am with Dell EMC presenting their High end storage from their office at Round Rock. With the world banking on Big Data and AI, core components like storage have to meet much more intensive computing demands, so it will be interesting to see what Dell EMC are doing in this space.
Thursday 3:00pm has another secret company on the schedule.
Then Friday is a Dell EMC day, with presentations at 10:00am and 1:00pm from their Server team.
What else happens?
While that schedule seems to have some big gaps, it’s an early start and a late finish for delegates. We stay together from breakfast to dinner (and after dinner drinks), travel to the different venues, and set up and pack down all our gear. There’s invariably a few sound bite recordings for various podcasts, and amazing spontaneous conversations about tech, business and life in general.
I love getting back to my Enterprise roots and hearing about the technology that powers big businesses, and many of the delegates become life-long friends.
How to participate
To view the live streams or any previous event recordings, visit http://techfieldday.com/
Follow the chat on twitter at #TFD16 https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=tfd16&src=typd
And if you’re interested in learning more or even becoming a delegate yourself: http://techfieldday.com/delegates/