By Calvin Zito   

There was great energy at HP Technology Forum on Monday night as it officially got underway.  I was able to sit in the front row of the opening sessions with a number of the "new media" folks that are here.  I'm not going to give a detailed review of the keynotes because I did that yesterday via Twitter as I and others gave blow by blow tweets of the keynotes.  (NOTE: even if you don't use Twitter, you can go to my Twitter page and see the tweets from me).  One of the new media guys streamed the keynotes as well and I believe you can watch it from his website: http://sdrnews.com.

With today's sessions starting soon, I'll be brief with this update.  As I listened to the keynotes from Ann Livermore (you can see bios of all the keynote speakers here: https://www.hptechnologyforum.com/keynotes.html), Paul Miller, and Prith Banerjee, storage was a large part of each of their keynotes.  One of the themes talked about frequently was convergence.  This will be the theme of today's storage keynote and since it starts in around an hour - and the walk from my room here at Mandalay Bay to the conference center is a long one - I'll save talking about it for my next post. 

At the end of the opening keynotes, I thought back to several years ago when it was a bit envious of the attention storage was getting from a few storage only-vendors.  Obviously, HP has a deep portfolio of products that is much more than storage and as a result, I used to wonder what it would be like to work for a company that was "all storage, all the time".  Well, I don't think about that any more.   I actually am wondering now whether those types of companies will survive on their own as the infrastructure around us converges. 

The keynotes on Monday helped really energize me and made me proud to work for HP and HP StorageWorks.   I'll give a Day 2 update either later tonight or tomorrow morning.