Dispatch From The Desert

Thoughts on the 2017 Gartner Data Center Conference.

Earlier in December, I attended the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations Management & Data Center Conference 2017 which was held December 4-7, 2017 at the Venetian Las Vegas. I look forward to the Gartner show every year and this year was no exception. In addition to an information-filled agenda, there were exhibit showcase networking receptions during the three days to allow attendees to peruse new products and technologies.

I met a lot of great people at the event, especially at the event lunches. I kept hearing the same thing: attendees were at the event to speak to Gartner analysts. The conference featured many ways to do this through interactive “Ask the Analyst” sessions along with roundtables, workshops, and meetups.

A couple of the sessions I attended included “The Journey to the Mix: Private Cloud, Public Cloud and Edge, with Thomas J. Bittman of Gartner; “The Future of Cloud Is Now. How Google Runs Its Own Infrastructure at Scale, with Miles Ward from Google; “Is ‘Serverless’ the Future of Servers?” with Arun Chandrasekaran of Gartner; and Backup and Recover: Time to Tame the Beast, with Dave Russell from Gartner. Like all conferences, there are just not enough hours in a day to attend every session.

My takeaway from the event is the inescapable fact that the cloud is here to stay in whatever form is necessary. Be it private, public, or a hybrid of the two, cloud computing is a style of operations not driven by cost but by agility and innovation, according to Bittman. And innovation to increase enterprise value drives the data center industry.

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Fritz was a former editor in chief of Mission Critical. She had been with BNP Media for more than a decade. She had been in charge of managing copy flow and the editorial production process for Mission Critical magazine since 2008. She was a graduate of Bowling Green State University. Read more articles by the author here: http://www.missioncriticalmagazine.com/caroline-fritz

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