Day 2 at ZertoCON 2017: The Cloud Revolution, General Michael Hayden, Replication Rocks Party
It’s Day 2 at ZertoCON 2017 and things are in full swing here in beautiful Boston! The IT Revolution continues and just to emphasize the fact, our guests were greeted as they arrived here at the Hynes Convention Center by a traditional fife and drum band blaring through the building! If you weren’t fully awake before you got here, you certainly were after hearing them!
After a bit of breakfast (and a whole lot of coffee) we kicked off the day with our opening keynote from Zerto CEO and founder Ziv Kedem. We had the opportunity to hear how Zerto has continued to progress and grow over the last year, how our partner community has grown to over 1,700 channel and cloud providers, plus how our philosophy of “Customer First” has helped us to break the 5,000 customer mark. There were a few hints at some of the new product features being developed for our feature releases, but no spoilers here – you’ll have to wait for our roadmap session tomorrow for all the juicy details!
Throughout the day, we of course had a fantastic selection of sessions available for our guests. Unsurprisingly, cloud is the hot topic at the moment and we had plenty of informative sessions to help people understand the possibilities and help guide them on their own unique journeys. With the ever-increasing APIs available in ZVR, automation is becoming more and more popular – so much so we’re going to need a bigger room for these sessions next year!
Our afternoon keynote was something a little special – General Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA and NSA joined us to offer his insights into how and why resilience is key. From a national level right down to corporations and individuals, the need to be resilient has become essential in this modern age. It was an absolutely fascinating insight into how threats have evolved over the years and how we have already, or must in future, adapt our methodologies to ensure we are protected against them.
Towards the end of the day, the zBooth transformed into a stage for our first ever Engineering Deathmatch. Two IT pros battled it out in a technical challenge configuring Zerto Cloud Manager and Zerto Self Service Portal, competing for a final prize of $4,000 towards a vacation of choice. Jeff McKaughan from Val Verde Unified School District won the challenge, while Paul Murnane, the runner-up from C Spire, left with an HTC Vive VR Headset + EVGA nVidia GTX1080 Video Card!
But of course, it wouldn’t be a true Zerto event without a party – and there ain’t no party like a Zerto party!!! This year we took over the House of Blues for our “Replication Rocks!” show – kicking off with none other than our very own house band, the Masters of Disaster! These guys absolutely blew the roof off the place and the crowd were loving it – but the evening was only just getting started! After the Masters of Disaster had warmed up the crowd, out came the Killer Queens – back in Boston once again – to wow us all with their renditions of some of the best Queen songs. It really is impossible to sit still when you’ve got 5 incredibly talented ladies blasting out the fantastic Bohemian Rhapsody!
And that, dear readers, was ZertoCON Day 2!
