Nell, Google and a Half Pipe! EnterConf Belfast – Day 2

Quote of the day. “Counterfeiting is an insidious problem in life sciences, our network tenant cloud can help stop it” – Shabbir Dahod – TraceLink, Inc

As EnterConf entered its second day, I continually saw the benefit of having more detailed discussions with people in the Enterprise sector. Even during the night events (the speaker dinner in the Harbour Commissioners Office, great venue, followed by a few sociables in the Dirty Onion Bar), I kept monitored the dynamics taking place. The networking normally began with two people, but the circles were growing, joining to form what I like to call “RoundStandUps”. These were normally not short conversations, and collaboration was inherent in the voices and chatter. There also was a deep and satisfying undertone, which was an energy to keep “building great” in Ireland.

Check out the Half Pipe! Hope its at Web Summit! 🙂

Half Pipe at EnterConf

Kicking us off on Centre Stage was none other than the inspirational futurist Nell Watson from Singularity University, who is also the CEO of Poikos, the smartphone 3D body measurement company. She talked about virtual employees, how we will replicate the human mind through AI in 20 years (and run business through AI). I liked how Nell bridged the machine and human inter-dependencies.  It was an insightful talk, and having spent the past year looking at machine intelligence (from both a hardware and software implementation perspective), I am seeing more and more futurists thinking like this.

Nell Watson, CEO of Poikos on Centre Stage

A few talks focused on our evolving workplace. David Hale, from Gigwalk spoke on the Insight stage on “Deploying Technology to Power Mobile Field Teams and Maximise Work Efficiency”. David spoke on how mobile tools for consumer brands and retailers are being used to more effectively manage field teams, gather in-store data and direct resources to improve retail execution ROI. David also spoke about how our employees are changing, and how companies have to empower the “Millennial Employee”, whose requirements include flexibility, and having a social and online mindset.

David Hale, from Gigwalk on the Insight Stage

Shabbir Dahod – TraceLink, Inc, spoke on the Centre stage, his topic – “Delivering the Internet of Things (IoT) to the Enterprise”, and it was one of the highlight talks of the summit I found. Shabbir spoke about how Tracelink were the world’s largest track and trace network for connecting the Life Sciences supply chain and eliminating counterfeit drugs from the global marketplace, by using their Life Sciences Cloud, configured in a network tenant architecture.

Shabbir Dahod – TraceLink, Inc

Thomas Davies, Head of Enterprise for Google drew a huge level of engagement from the crowd with his talk on the next stage of collaboration. Thomas mentioned the evolution of how we collaborate, but even since the early 1980’s the structures were quite rigid and have not changed that much up to a few years ago. But now, customer and employee expectations have changed. They are fast, 24/7, global and personalised. He discussed how employees and organisations are more efficient when they collaborate. “We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us” – Marshall McLuan.

Thomas Davies (Google) in exhuberant form on Center Stage

One last talk Ill cover is a topic that is somewhat under the covers of Enterprise IT, and I am glad that Engin Akyol of Distil Networks talked on “Dark Cloud: Cloud Providers as a Platform for Bot Attacks”. Engin first spoke about good bots, which do serve a purpose for major cloud providers. But this talk was focusing on bad bots, which slow down application performance and skew analytics. As the volume of cloud platforms continues to scale, this leads to ease in setting up bot networks which can pilfer content from websites, or launch other malicious attacks.

Engin Akyol of Distil Networks

So, ill sign off from EnterConf 2015, and onto Web Summit in November, with many events, collaborations and new experiences in between. As a two day conference, perhaps I built less contacts than I expected to. But the ones I did are more meaningful contacts, and EnterConf allows their attendees an environment to do that. I also sat in on round-tables on big data and security, which gave yet another dynamic. It really is a conference experience I will be returning to. Special mention to all the organisers, volunteers and the inspiring venue. Goodbye Belfast, hello Dublin!

Oh, I almost forgot, I really hope Krem Coffee are at Web Summit, awesome coffee!

EnterConf Belfast- Day 1

Firstly, to the quote of the day “We all have to avoid software that epically sucks”.

Me at the Insight Stage!

Today I attended day one of the Enter Conf in Belfast, which for those who don’t know it, is a spin off conference from Web Summit focused at the Enterprise aspect of our tech world. On initial entry, I must admit I was really proud of the Enter Conf team for choosing the venue. It had lost of lot of history associated with it, being in the heart of the titanic quarter where the Titanic was built, and for its time, was an “Enterprise ship”! This created a chilled out atmosphere which was a nice differential from the Web Summit to be held again in November. It was full of detailed and focused meetups and conversations, and did a great job at giving a different experience of what a conference can provide. Kudos.
There were two stages, named Center and Insights, with startup exhibits, food and coffee stands to ensure everyone was nicely refreshed throughout the day. Whilst I wont cover all talks, I have picked out a few to cover to show the types of elements being discussed.

The first one Ill mention was by Lukas Biewald of Crowdflower, entitled “Processing Open Data”, who spoke extensively on their efforts to clean up the data, and also looking into elements of data moderation. It really resonated with me as I am interested and developing data cleanse frameworks over the past number of years, and always struggle with the data pollution that skews our insight. Quote from Lukas “If you want to improve your algorithm, just add more data”. Lukas is in action below.

Lukas Biewald of Crowdflower

Stephen McKeown from AnalyticsEngines and Amir Orad from Sisense were also in a panel on “Democratising Data”, which focused the talk on ensuring companies of all sizes speed up their analytics creates a more level playing field for startups competing with Enterprise. Quote from this section “Bring data into your companies DNA”

Stephen McKeown and Amir Orad

There were a few familiar faces present, with my former EMC colleague and mentor Steve Todd amongst the speakers, on “Economic Value of Data” (check out Steve’s blog here for more fascinating content in this topic. Steve spoke on the Center stage, and it was great to see this topic present, as it really stood out as a conversation we all should be having. Steve gave a similar talk in Cork for an it@Cork event we organised in February, and it was great to see the advancement in Steve’s research in this area. Steve spoke on “Valuation Business Processes” and categories within that being M&A, Asset Valuation, Data Monetisation, Data Sale and Data Insurance. I wont spoil the rest, as I am sure Steve will blog on this soon.

Steve Todd speaking on Economic Value of Data

Also on Center Stage, in one of talks to close out the evening, Barak Regev, Head of Google Cloud Platform – EMEA spoke on “Architecting the Cloud”. It was great to get an update on their vision, and Barak showed Googles vision to “Build Whats Next”

Barack Regev from Google – Build Whats Next

And to end on a great quote from to James Petter VP EMEA for Pure Storage – “Security should be like an onion, it should be layered, and you cant reach the center without breaching a layer”

The day brought many epic conversations from over 10 different nationalities, including a walk back to the city with the visionary Teemu Arina. His talk on Biohacking was incredible insightful. It spoke to the challenge around humans tracking their life through Self Quantisation. Teemu took me though his idea for how humans can do a better job on hacking their bodies for information and using that to improve life quality. Teemu’s book is here!

So now, its off to the night dinner, drink a beer two and to build a few more contacts! In the morning, it looks like a few good talks on Machine Intelligence will start the trend for another awesome day!