Top 10 Highlights from the Virtual Vertica BDC 2020

Posted April 14, 2020 by Jeff Healey, Sr Director, Vertica Product Marketing at Micro Focus

While it was a difficult decision to take the Vertica Big Data Conference 2020 virtual, the registration numbers, session reviews, and overall feedback confirmed that this was our most successful BDC ever! If you did not have a chance to register or missed any of the sessions, no worries. All sessions were recorded and PDFs of the presentations are available on-demand.

Here are the top 10 highlights (in no particular order) from the Virtual Vertica Big Data Conference 2020:

1. Record-breaking attendance – Nearly 3,000 virtual attendees tuned in to catch more than 20 sessions over the two days. Vertica GM and SVP Colin Mahony kicked off our general session, followed by a special guest appearance from Micro Focus CEO Stephen Murdoch, and capped off by highly anticipated presentations from Amy Fowler (VP of Strategy and Solutions, FlashBlade Business at Pure Storage), and John Yovanovich, Director of IT, from AT&T.
2. Five-star session reviews – Naturally, being an analytics organization, we have statistics on everything – from number of event views to number of questions to, most importantly for our presenters, session reviews. The majority of BDC sessions received 5 stars, with an average of 4.8.
3. AT&T, Domo, Philips, The Trade Desk, Uber, and Zebrium shared their eye-opening stories – Customer-led sessions are always our most popular sessions. It would be a disservice to try to capture the essence of these incredible stories, so you’ll just have to check them all out here. To give you a glimpse, here’s a quote from Ron Cormier of The Trade Desk – “Eon is the wave of the future for us. Vertica in Eon Mode is the most efficient MPP database on the market. By that I mean, for each dollar, we get the most processing power.”
4. Announcing Vertica 10 – During our general session, Colin Mahony announced Vertica 10, detailing how the industry’s leading analytical data warehouse unifies data siloes across cloud and hybrid environments with additional Vertica in Eon Mode support for Google Cloud Platform and Hadoop communal storage. Vertica 10 also includes advanced integration with TensorFlow and Python, including import, export and management of PMML models, for you to operationalize Machine Learning.
5. Vertica engineers fielded hundreds of attendee questions – Vertica in Eon Mode was one of the hottest topics of the event, with 44 questions asked for the session – Vertica in Eon Mode: Past, Present, and Future. Not to be outdone, one best practices session – Optimizing Query Performance and Resource Pool Tuning – actually had 45 questions.
6. And more questions answered in Vertica Forums – As you would expect, we often ran out of time and couldn’t answer every question during the live Q&A portions of the sessions. So, our engineering team posted all of the unanswered questions to our user forums to keep the lively conversations going well beyond the actual event.
7. Interviews and coverage from theCUBE – Customers, partners, and Vertica executives joined Dave Vellante on theCUBE, for some great interviews throughout the conference. Check them all out, including Joe Gonzalez of Mass Mutual.
8. Participation from broader Micro Focus – In addition to Micro Focus CEO Stephen Murdoch helping to kick off our conference, the Voltage SecureData team shared how Vertica customers can take advantage of seamless integration to protect data in-use for analytics, comply with GDPR and data privacy, and reduce the risk of data breaches. Check out Rich Gaston’s Cube interview here.
9. Incredible support from our partner ecosystem – There are too many partners to thank for supporting this unique event – whether that’s attending to learn more about Vertica, spreading the word to drive registrations, or connecting with our current and future customers to ensure their success. But, a special thanks goes out to Pure Storage and Arrow as already signing up to sponsor Vertica Big Data Conference 2021.
10. Wait…Vertica Big Data Conference 2021 is booked? – Yes, Vertica Big Data Conference 2021 will be held at the same time next year – April 1-4 at The Encore in Boston. We’re going to keep the momentum going right up to that time next year with our full schedule of Data Disruptors and Under the Hood Webcasts.