I am very fortunate to be invited to various conferences, events and sessions with vendors and community leaders. One of these events is the vRetreat day that is organised by @patrick Redknapp. This was my second vRetreat day and based on 2018’s I was looking forward to the day.
I would like to thank Patrick and his sponsors for the sessions!
In 2018 Patrick organised a day with Zerto & Cohesity followed by some competitive games at Crystal maze London. More on this 2018 event can be found here:
- Event Overview: http://www.mrtechtalk.com/vretreat-day-2018/
- Zerto Session: http://www.mrtechtalk.com/vretreat-day-2018-zerto/
- Cohesity Session: http://www.mrtechtalk.com/vretreat-day-2018-cohesity/
This year the event was held at some second-rate football club, Chelsea FC, at Stamford Bridge. (sorry I am a Liverpool FC fan). I personally had never been to Stamford Bridge but what a stadium and tour. Learning about the psychology of the dressing room fit outs to the way home and away teams are treated.
The agenda sent out by Patrick for the day can be seen below:
The sessions this year were sponsored by Cohesity, and we all got access to roadmap information as well as a hands-on lab to test drive the product and its capabilities. More on Cohesity can be found in my follow blogs part1 & part2.
The days attendees from various backgrounds can be found below with links to their blog sites and twitter handles:
| Attendee | Blog Site | Twitter Handle |
| Chris Bradshaw | www.isjw.uk | @aldershotchris |
| Ather Beg | www.atherbeg.com | @AtherBeg |
| Megan Warren | www.definetomorrow.co.uk | @BizTechMeg |
| Barry Coombs | www.definetomorrow.co.uk | @VirtualisedReal |
| Andy Nash | www.andynashers.wordpress.com | @andynash99 |
| Mark Brown | www.baysidechronicle.com | @DathBrun |
Patrick created an overview of the day in a short video as can be found below:
The event is aimed at a small group of invited community bloggers, keeping it personal with open forum-based discussions on what we are seeing, they are seeing whilst updating us on their products and services. I find this type of event extremely useful, especially to hear what customers and other partners may or may not be doing and why!
Within the industry there is a bit of a taboo on people talking about what they do and why, due to the competitiveness in the industry.
Personally, I don’t think this should be the case and discussing what everyone is seeing from a technical perspective allows us to become much more aware of the vendor marketing FUD to all better serve our customers whether that be customers or end users directly. And you never know you may learn something new!
Overall this was a great event and I would like to thank Patrick Redknapp (@patrickredknap) for organising this with his busy schedule. Also, a big thank you to Cohesity for making the event possible and keeping it free for the attendees! Look forward to the next one! I would strongly advise anybody interested in joining Patricks list of potential attendees that you reach out to him on the following details:
- Twitter: @patrickredknap
- Website: https://www.red-track.co.uk/
