As we wrap up the IT event season, I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on my first time attending Microsoft Ignite. Where should I begin? First, thank you to everyone who stopped by our booth, asked questions, received a demo, or simply chatted with us. We had a great crew at the booth, balancing each other’s skill sets, taking breaks, and keeping up our energy over the long days. I attended a few sessions, walked the expo floor, and met cool people over the week in San Francisco.
Session Insights
I attended a few sessions, which were both fun and enlightening. Of course, Josh Stageberg also gave a presentation in the Partner Theater. One of my favorite quotes during his presentation was, “It’s not about what went wrong. It’s about how you get back up.” That stuck with me as Josh walked through a follow-the-outage scenario, highlighted our artificial intelligence (AI) observability feature functionality (such as AI Query Assist, Root Cause Assist, and dynamic thresholds), gave a sneak peek at the AI agent in tech preview, and dove into how these capabilities reduce mean time to detect and mean time to resolve and extend mean time between incidents.
I also felt there were many takeaways for all industries from the talks I attended, which were targeted at nonprofits, such as Silo Busting for Nonprofits. While they focused on the struggles nonprofits face—such as disconnected information limiting impact, legacy systems holding them back, and outdated technology being a big barrier to cloud and AI technologies—these are also barriers for many other industries. They presented strategies to get past those barriers, including seemingly simple steps such as clarifying your foundational priorities, enabling an ecosystem of innovation, aligning people and processes, and then building operational processes for implementing AI. One quote I liked from this discussion was, “AI is a contact sport. You’ve got to get your hands dirty to really understand it.” The best advice from the session was that this task can be overwhelming, so it should be broken down into actionable spheres.
The final session I want to share insight from was also the silliest and most fun. Scott Hanselman and Mark Russinovich walked us all through connecting technology across the ages. They did this using the game Zork (1977), an Atari bootloader, Azure, and AI. It was fun watching them play through a sequence in the game on the bootloader and in an emulator in a container, then set up AI players to play the game, and finally have many AI players compete to finish the same sequence. While you probably don't need to know how to do this, it was entertaining and emphasized the point of the conversation. The major takeaway regarding vibe coding and AI in general was that the fundamentals still matter. The deep knowledge they already had of how things connect and how the code should function meant they knew the right prompts to input to get the output they were looking for and could adjust prompts to correct any issues.
Expo Goodness
There were, of course, many booths in the expo hall, but I want to mention some cool exhibits I saw (with pictures). Microsoft had a fully built LEGO version of the campus you could explore, and Cisco Workspace had a full conference room—but that wasn’t the cool part. The cool part was the wall outside, where they had numerous tech devices, including cameras, a phone, and speakers, all powered through the network by a switch, with some nice RGB lighting as a cherry on top. They also had a couple of interesting exhibits where they discussed how certain brands were using Microsoft technology, such as Heinz and Levi’s (pictured).
There were many stages set up throughout the expo hall with talks happening during the day, which I’m sure were great. I didn’t get to attend any except Josh’s, but I walked by toward the end of a talk where a speaker had a crowd of over 100 people on their feet, jumping and dancing with him. It looked like fun, and I was impressed by the crowd interaction the speaker got. It’s great to see people having a good time and engaging in a large group this way.
Of course, we had our booth with a great Solarian crew. We had many customers and visitors stop by to say hello, collect fun swag, enter the daily LEGO giveaway, ask questions, or simply express their appreciation for our software. Speaking of swag, we had plenty of goodies to give away, but the most popular item was custom luggage tags. People waited in line for up to 45 minutes to get theirs. I was lucky to get a test print with my dog, Ahsoka, on it. It was wonderful having conversations with so many people in different roles and types of organizations.
In Summation
I enjoyed my time at Ignite, where I learned, engaged, worked hard, and had fun. There were many great sessions to attend and not enough time, but I felt I gained new perspectives. I met good people and had great conversations. I hope to see you at the next in-person event.
Staff selfie: (left to right, back to front) Kelly Tice, Harry Wilde Greer, Sean Denton, Cody Wilson, Parth Chandarana, Patrick McGrath, Josh Stageberg, Amiya Adwitya, Mara Cassin, Thomas Rincones, me, James Kessinger, Stephanie Green, and Fabiana Leandro Fermin
Custom luggage tag featuring Ahsoka
Microsoft LEGO campus
The network-powered wall by Cisco Workspace
Levi’s exhibit
