By Chris Purcell

Interesting first impressions arriving at Las Vegas international airport – chipper, excited people arriving, to a lot of blearing, tired people leaving. This is my fist opportunity to visit HP Tech Forum which is being held at the Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas – which has attracted over 3,000 attendees this year and serves as HP’s premier technology showcase in the USA.

The opening keynotes started around 4.30 local time with Tom Ianotti (SVP, TSG Americas) opening for Ann Livermore (EVP TSG), who provided her famous integrated HP address tying in the total company in as a service. She presented well and was well received by the audience. She provided some great sound bites like HP is selling 11 servers a minute more than any other company on the planet. She was followed by Paul Miller (ESS, VP of marketing) that focused in on wrapping the HP enterprise, servers and storage together. His theme was clearly around where other companies see a form-factor, HP sees convergence to deliver everything as a service. One of the points that I really liked was when he was describing Matrix – a new Blade System offering that was recently released in April. Paul described it as a “private cloud network in a box – applies to economics, scalability and response time of cloud computing to any application, in-house.
 
The last keynote was from Prith Banerjee (SVP of HP Labs) who stole my imagination with his presentation on HP labs and the amazing work they are doing. Everything from Cloud computing and providing everything as a service (– Billions of users, millions of services, thousands of service providers, millions of servers, exabytes of data and terabytes of traffic.) To, Analytics (– an application of mathematic and scientific methodologies created better run business.) I will be really interesting to see if it really is fact or fiction. Time will tell, but it was great to see Lab provide this very exciting show-and-tell.
 
There was a great opportunity to “meet and greet” show attendees in the expo from 6.00 through 8.00 pm, during which time I had a chance to talk to Scott Anderson (HP, VP of marketing for TSG) and discussed social media and where he see this heading. He had some great insights and opinions mentioned some interesting opportunities that lay ahead for HP. More to follow.

Also, I had a chance to tour the HP POD (Performance Optimized Datacenter) – something I find fascinating. The POD on display at the show had two new SL units (SL 6000’s) stowed aboard which were attracting a certain amount of attention. It also had the utilities vehicle parked along side which I had not seen before, but will explore further.
 
The evening ended for me going to a “Tweetup” which was my first ever. Essentially all the Twiterers at the show having an opportunity to meet each other in person. Quite a few folks had turned up and it was great to meet people in person. Met with a lot of members of the Connect community – who I will talk to more during the show, along with Calvin Zito @hpstorageguy who is an avid blogger and Twitterer. Twitter is being heavily promoted at the show this year, which is a great utility for no participants to keep up with daily activity at the show. I found a great landing page which captures most of the event activities – check it out at www.hp.com/go/HPTF-buzz.
 
So All-in-all it was a really interesting first day...it is great to be here and hopefully I will be able to provide more layman’s view of the HP Tech Forum 2009. Stay tuned.