This week I attended my first ever BriForum in London. Being mindful of the expense involved, I actually opted to submit a session to try and get around the problem of forking out cold hard cash to attend. I was suitably surprised when my session was actually accepted, cueing weeks of nervousness as I watched previous sessions and wondered whether a) my PowerPoint skills were actually up to scratch, and b) if I actually had anything interesting to say.
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| My good self trying to talk app analysis tools |
For the uninitiated, BriForum is the independent virtualization conference that was the brainchild of the founder over at BrianMadden.com, Brian Madden (rather obviously), who is ably supported by fellow bloggers Gabe Knuth and Jack Madden. It’s been going for a long time now and in the absence of a European Synergy event, has almost become the conference of choice for European IT pros looking to get technical insight and future roadmaps around the whole virtualization arena. But it’s also independent (despite still having a strong Citrix taste around the whole event), which in my book, is always a good thing. Vendor influence can cast a slight shadow on the value of conferences, so having something that is purportedly vendor-agnostic is always good when it comes to selecting those that you’d like to attend.
Despite there being many parts of the United Kingdom besides London (a common dig you will find me making), BriForum was held right in the heart of the nation’s capital, and I did find it quite an interesting and useful experience. Firstly, it’s always quite fascinating to actually bring your “virtual” world into the real one. There are many people I bumped into who I had only actually previously interacted with online and it was intriguing to actually make their acquaintance. Secondly, I found there to be a great level of technical content across a fairly broad spectrum of attendee experience, deeply-focused sessions mixing quite readily with those that took more of a “twenty thousand feet” view of the whole virtualization area. Even in subjects where I felt I already knew quite a lot about the topic at hand, there was always something interesting to take away, and at the end of the conference I had lots of ideas for new articles and new ways of solving problems that I’m hoping to write up very soon (having now been freed from the pressure of worrying myself stupid about how my session was going to be received!)
I did manage to reap the benefit of being one of the first sessions to be delivered and despite being slightly alarmed that I actually appeared to have a decent number of attendees, I almost perversely enjoyed the challenge of getting it across. Spotting guys like Tim Mangan in the crowd (whose app virtualization articles I’ve been reading for a very long time!) almost took me to a panic-attack-like state of trepidation, but once I got into the flow of things the pressure eased and I’m almost at the stage where I’m thinking I might actually like to try and do it again. In fact, I’d go so far as to recommend to anyone that they give it a go – as long as they don’t end up like poor Jarian Gibson, who someone apparently attempted to poison at the speaker dinner the previous night :-)
There were a sizeable number of interesting characters to meet and vendors to trade opinions with, which added up to what was all-in-all a very good few days. I’d have to give honourable mentions to Dan Bolton for his unique presentation style, Dane Young for some high-quality heckling, Dan Allen for being generally boisterous and offering his opinions on PVD, Tim Mangan and Ian Parker for being very polite and attentive despite the fact they seemed to struggle with my north-eastern accent, Jim Moyle for dispelling the myth of the two-fingered salute, Kevin Goodman for paying for a whole host of beers and Andy Wood for not reacting badly to my taking photos of him while he was asleep (on the train) and posting them on Twitter. All japes aside, I found it very useful and I came away after the exchange of ideas with many people feeling suitably inspired to try new approaches and methods in my day-to-day consultancy, which is a very good thing.
There were some interesting vendors attending too – outside of the usual circles of vendors like Citrix, VMware, Atlantis, AppSense et al, there were some of the newer, more disruptive ones such as FSLogix and Cloudhouse peddling their wares, which again made for some interesting conversations.
What were the main points I could take away from the conference as a whole? I feel the consensus seems to be that layering, such as done by AppVolumes and UniDesk, is something we’re still waiting to see deliver on the promise that it has made over the last couple of years. And the fact that IT departments the world over still seem to be making the same mistakes that they always have. And there still isn’t any clear sign that an “end-to-end” solution such as those provided by Citrix and VMware is ready to take over the EUC market any time soon – despite these companies being involved in what now amounts to an all-out feature war, there isn’t yet a heavy push from the customer end towards adopting these technology stacks en masse.
But the biggest focus I found was that people are still having to be told that user experience is king. No matter what the metrics, the goals, the success criteria, the focus is still absolutely on user experience as the primary driver. And I think that’s good. We’re finally reaching an era where IT is service-oriented, where they’re looking to enable their users, to serve the business rather than serve the inflation of their own departmental self-importance.
So I’m hoping that all those who attended BriForum 2015 in London found it as useful as I did. Hopefully I might even have contributed something to this through my own session! But also let’s not forget it shouldn’t all be deadly serious and technically-focused – it should be about having a bit of fun. I’m sure Will Southern from Noble Foods did, managing somehow to win the “Geek-Out” quiz despite the fact that one of his rivals answered the hardest questions and finished last.
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| The prize for the Geek Out champion - let's see him defend his title in Denver |
All in all, a very good few days. If you’ve never been to a BriForum before, I’d definitely recommend that you do give it a go at some point - the sooner the better.
And with any luck, normal blogging service should be resumed from hereon in, now that I’ve broken my conference-presenting duck and relieved myself from all the associated pressure!