Snowflake Cloud World Tour 2022 London was my first proper conference in well.. Years. and it was lovely to get back to them.
This one was at the Excel centre London and with the new Elizabeth line, that meant that getting from the finance district (Liverpool Street) to the conference was truly 20 minutes door to door, making it absolutely perfect for me and a lot of the attendees, particularly as this was only a one day conference mid week, which meant that I could actually drop into work, get some stuff done, then nip over to the conference in plenty of time for coffee and keynote.
The external directions weren’t anything to speak of, but once you found the hall it was situated in 1, everything was nice and easy. Registration was very smooth and catering was a professional affair. As a previous booth babe and stallholder myself, the layout of the stalls was just right. Everyone had sufficient space. Wi Fi was solid, plus all other kinds of facilities you would hope for in a conference were there.
The event its self was much smaller than I was expecting 2. But nonetheless it had a good and well balanced opening Keynote which had all you would want in it, from demos to new reveals, to company history, all that kind of stuff.
I particularly liked that each of the major industries got a little shout out and an acknowledgment of how they are being addressed
“I remember early on, the CEO of a very large insurance company in the US really didn’t want to talk about architecture and computing, because they’re insurance people right. They said we may have very different insurance claims between Northern Ireland and Ireland itself. How do you explain that? And how can you do that fast and how can you do it accurately, as we may have to change policy or we have to change pricing. This is the type of stuff that preoccupies insurance executives because that’s the difference between winning and losing, and being profitable and being unprofitable”
The Image above was in every session I went to and is obviously the main push.
In fact the only part that made me roll my eyes a tiny bit was the inevitable push into applications, as it seems that every company that has a good product always seems to have half an eye on the huge fortune Apple made on phone apps, and are just waiting for a chance to shoe horn applications into their offering, well we will see if snowflake is any different,
On the individual sessions, all the ones I went to were excellent, following the tried and tested method of having “tracks” so you did not get many conflicts on what you wanted to go to, most of them were driven by actual snowflake people. It wasn’t the same diversity and partner driven sessions that I am used to with some of the vendors like IBM or Salesforce, but I learned a lot so have no complaints
Presentation equipment was again excellent, I am seeing this as a previous speaker myself with uber bright projectors, everyone had nice clear mics you could hear from everywhere in the room.
Top feature of the whole day I have to say was my snowflake contact “Ben”, who identified me as I passed the main stall with a frown on my face, he must have had a list of about 1000 people to keep an eye out for, and to identify one of us who he has only met once, in a crowd to say hello, wins huge brownie points.
Time wise. Other than the sessions I managed to rip the heart out of everything I needed in about three hours, and went away very satisfied and determined to go back to the next one, I’m not a snowflake evangelist, so I’m not going to get over excited about anything, however I went there with a list of questions from my colleagues, a list of questions myself, and a set of future plans I needed to cater to.
I went away with everything I wanted answered, and with a plan of action, so everything you could want in a day conference 3.
Food catered for every dietary need and quibble, particularly for me, as no one seemed to want the vegan burritos so I was able to eat so many that I waddled and filled up on good coffee, Nice.
