Gestalt IT was thrilled to have a great group of delegates join us two weeks ago for Networking Field Day. One of the joys of working with a group of professionals and influencers like this is the fact that they are outspoken and love to share their thoughts around the event and the presenting companies.
What Was Your Favorite Part?
The delegates were super excited about the companies at the event. When it came to impressive presenters, Matt Haedo really liked Juniper Networks and their recent acquisition of 128 Technology. He’s looking forward to seeing how they’re all going to integrate the pieces together into something exciting for customers to deploy to their users. Darrel Clute and David Varnum both loved Itential and their automation platform. The ease of use for companies without the technical ability to jump headfirst into automation blends well with the more advanced capabilities to let your programmers use their own tools and merge the changes together into one seamless experience.
Larry Smith enjoyed seeing DriveNets for the first time and seeing how they are not only distributing a microservices architecture for the data center but scaling it across the network in a disaggregated fashion. Aaron Conaway was excited to hear about his first look at Network to Code’s Nautobot. This release builds on the functionality they showed off at a previous event and adds support for new technologies like GraphQL that networking professionals are clamoring for.
What Makes Field Day Special For You?
Networking Field Day is more than just presentations, though. There’s a kind of magic that makes people enjoy coming back to the event again and again. For Keith Parsons, it’s all about being able to ask questions live and get immediate feedback. Instead of submitting a question via a chat box, you can hop right in and get the answer you’re looking for. Interaction is the best teacher of all. For Micheline Murphy, the updates from previous presenters are the key reason she comes back. She enjoyed giving feedback to them and seeing how they took that feedback and developed it into their products to add functionality or make things easier to use. It’s enjoyable to see your perspective and expertise being valued at an event like this.
When it comes to signing up to be a delegate at Field Day, it’s important to realize that everyone has their own reasons for coming. For Jeffrey Powers, it’s the one-on-one conversations you get to have with the companies. No trade show floors or a room full of people trying to sell you something. Just questions that get answered no matter how hard they are. For Larry Smith, it’s about meeting people in your industry and learning how they do things their way. You may think you have something all figured out and then realize someone else is doing it better or faster. We’re never too wrapped up in what we’re doing to learn a new way to make our jobs or our lives easier.
Bringing It All Together
Networking Field Day is something special because the delegates make it special. Their perspectives on the presenters and the panel of people are the magic behind it all. Companies want to hear from them because they’re the experts at what they do. The community wants their opinions and analysis of the technology to know what is worth deploying and what is worth leaving behind. The delegates are the core of Field Day events and we are thrilled to have them with us every step of the way.
