Conference Season Continues…at GigaOM Structure

On Wednesday this week, I had the opportunity to attend GigaOM Structure at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. I haven’t been to the conference in a few years, but the event was excellent, as usual, with its stellar lineup, cutting-edge industry discussions and sold-out guest list.

The conference started off with some familiar faces - GigaOM CEO Paul Walborsky and GigaOM Editor Barb Darrow - giving a warm welcome speech. After that, the conference boasted a lineup of heavy hitters from some of the most innovative companies in the business.

Jay Parikh from Facebook announced the release of Facebook’s new computer networking switch. That was followed by Werner Vogels from Amazon who hit the message home that there won’t be a single winner in the cloud space. Then, Vinod Khosla made his way on stage to discuss the current state of cloud economics. With a packed house and strong content, this conference exceeded my expectations and proved to be very fruitful, all before noon.Intel also announced the production of a new cloud chip that would allow apps to work “twice as fast as before.” This sounded great, but they couldn’t announce their work timeline or any customers who were using it.After lunch, I met with multiple GigaOM research analysts and reporters, media friends from a few different publications, and many new faces. It was a great opportunity to chat about where the industry is headed.Overall, I thought the show was fantastic and heard very positive feedback from everyone that I spoke to during my time at Structure. It was a first-class production with an A-list group, and I’ve already blocked out my calendar for next year’s event.