Dispatches from the front line of the world’s major enterprise event

Gospel Technology attended their first VMworld US this August, widely regarded as one of the biggest gatherings of enterprise professionals on the planet.  Liam Jones takes a breather to reflect on the experience as a member of the Gospel team promoting their tech to such a huge potential audience in Las Vegas.

Gospel Technology have taken an educated leap of faith and begun moving away from attending the various specialist blockchain events, along with all their ‘hype’ and ongoing bias towards ‘Crypto’, and have rightly stepped into the world of enterprise infrastructure events, where the players are established and the conversations real.

I made up the advanced party of our 5-man dream-team in attendance and, whilst pottering around setting up our 10×10, could not help but be utterly staggered by the effort and vision of some of the bigger players in attendance. The likes of Rubrik and Cohesity (a huge rivalry in the secondary data/data management world) had really put a lot of others to shame with their sheer presence and provided something for us all to aspire to. This was one of the first signs that I knew we were in the right place; this in combination with the $2000 entry ticket price suggested a certain quality of attendee. The event kicked off with an evening session on the Sunday and our booth was ready.

A few others of the team had arrived, so we had the day to explore before everything got real. Whilst Vegas has a certain allure to some people, I only had one thing in mind, the remarkable feat of engineering that is the Hoover Dam. The picture here really does struggle to do it justice and just reading some of the facts and figures about its construction back in the 30’s gave you a harrowing insight into quite how much of a marvel it was and still is today. I’d thoroughly recommend a visit if you’re in that part of the world.

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We were the first and only vendor talking about an enterprise application of Blockchain at the show

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Sunday evening came around and everyone was ready to go, all equipped with the finest t-shirts and biggest smiles at any tradeshow out there. We were the first and only vendor talking about an enterprise application of Blockchain at the show and we felt the pressure – each one of us knows the potential of our team and our product and were eager to get into the flow of conversation with anyone we could convince to listen. Luckily, we had a vast supply of those renowned t-shirts (not to mention a different, compelling message!) to lure people in…

There was not a single conversation I had where whoever I was speaking with (all the way from VMware admins to CxOs of huge enterprises) wasn’t astounded at what Gospel Technology are doing and have done to date. Some of the biggest organisations in the world have been dealing with the pain we address for decades and saw value within minutes of speaking with us, if that’s not validation, I don’t know what is.

Part of working for a company at such an early stage is how involved everyone is. Not only did we have Ben, myself (sales) and Trent (technical sales) working the crowd but Ian (CEO/Founder) and Reuben (VP Tech) were also there to lend their passion and expertise to the discussion. I truly valued the moments I was part of the conversations with them all – I’m always keen to be inspired!

Both Ian and Reuben had the opportunity to contribute to a BrightTALK panel discussing the ‘Future of Data Centers and Cloud in a Virtualized World’. If you click on the photo you can watch how Ian, Reuben and Jeremy Snyder [after some bias encouragement], moved the conversation into the importance of trust, security, privacy and ethics of data in the Cloud.

This went on until Wednesday afternoon with various ebbs and flows throughout the day but there was never a dull moment when discussing our technology. It’s reasonably safe to say we were all exhausted by the end but there was certainly a sense of elation too. Working for a start-up comes with a certain desire for constant validation that you have something special and VMworld provided that in spades.

It was my first US VMworld event and the bar had been set high by my experience in Europe but I remained astounded by how incredibly well it was executed not only from an exhibitor perspective but the same has to be said about the labs and keynotes; every time they came up in conversation it was only in a positive manner outside of them being overly popular/oversubscribed!

A final mention has to go to the people who weren’t there. Not only do we have various stellar supporting functions here at Gospel but we all remain eternally grateful for the hard work and ingenuity that comes from our development team, led by Reuben. Working in sales may put me on the front line but we are nothing without the genius behind what we are selling.

Hugely excited to be in my 6th month here at Gospel Technology, surrounded by greatness and potential. It’s about to get a little crazy following up the vast ocean of opportunity generated after the summer period. If you haven’t taken 5 minutes to understand what we do, you’re missing out big time – if you can at least spare 90 seconds click here!

Now, time to get back to following up those conversations…

For an in-depth overview of the Gospel solution click here.

Ask the team – many of your questions answered.