Wrap up of Tech Conferences Last Week

The airlines made out pretty good this week from the Tech industry. There was a ton of conferences and news this past week from clouds, to energy, to Bill Gates retiring.

I, unfortunately, was not able to attend any of these conferences, primarily due to an equally hectic schedule of things going on at work. Luckily there was a lot of blogs and news sites reporting on the various events and here are some highlights of what I have seen.

• Cisco Live! in Orlando. Cisco had events in Second Life and John Chambers keynote. Here are some links to items from that conference: Michael J. Morris micro-blogged the event (complete with pictures); Cisco talked about the shortage of skilled engineers and their new elearning network; Jim Duffy comments on Cisco flushing out their data center vision; Wendell Odom comments on the announcement that Cisco will break out the CCNA certification into 3 new exams (Voice, Security and wireless; John Cox comments on the demonstration between Cisco and Nivis of a wireless IP mesh network using IPv6; and finally, there was news about he creation of a consortium to drive global security. Cisco, IBM, Intel, Juniper and Microsoft formed the Industry Consortium for Advancement of Security on the Internet (ICASI).

• GigaOm's Structure 08 - San Francisco: the two highlights of this one (IMO) if I could have attended would have been Werners Vogels (Amazon CTO) and Debra Chrapaty (Microsoft). Michael Halligan did some live blogging, Rich Miller reported from the conference and GigaOm has some videos (via Mogulus)! PC World has an article on Microsoft and the container model (I watched this one on the Mogulus videos -- very good presentation).

• O'Reilly Velocity - Burlingame, CA: This conference was about web performance and scalability. Rich Miller had several posts from the conference and O'Reilly has the video from Rich Wolski's Eucalyptus talk (Eucalyptus is an open source software infrastructure for cloud computing). You can also view the presentation given about the LinkedIn.com communication architecture.

• Data Center Energy Summit - Santa Clara: I haven't had much time to review this conference yet, but it looked pretty cool (pun intended). Rich has a post on the IBM Cool Blue rear door heat exchanger liquid cooling unit.

• LT Pact - Las Vegas: Although I had not heard of this conference before, I knew several people going to it. 3Tera was a sponsor and James Staten (Principal Analyst with Forrester) gave a keynote on Could/Grid computing. Anastasia Tubanos at WHIR blogs about the conference here.

• Catalyst Conference - San Diego: The Burton Group conference had themes of building the dynamic data center, identity management, security, wireless, SOA, and the new ways of work.