The launch of Microsoft’s answer to Slack, two conferences for the Big Data crowd, and a certain saint’s big, green day are all up ahead for the SMB channel this week.
By Rich Freeman- Two big conferences for data wallowers and another from SaaSMAX on security, plus a cloud growth update from Oracle and the greenest day of the year are all on the SMB channel’s agenda this week.
Monday, March 13th
- The Microsoft Dynamics 365 Tech Conference gets rolling in Seattle. It wraps up on Wednesday.
Reader ROI: Hosted by Dynamics Communities, an independent organization that operates the officially sanctioned Microsoft Dynamics 365 user group, the Tech Conference is a deep dive into Dynamics 365 for Operations, the multi-faceted ERP solution recently added to Microsoft’s cloud-based Dynamics 365 line-of-business suite. The show kicks off today with a keynote address by Sri Srinivasan, who runs the Dynamics 365 for Operations product group, and is followed on Thursday by a one-day, in-depth conference dedicated to the retail industry version of the solution.
- Strata + Hadoop World, a conference for Big Data aficionados, opens in San Jose, Calif. It closes on Thursday.
Reader ROI: Today and tomorrow are mostly dedicated to training sessions. Keynotes and thought leadership sessions on trends, techniques, and best practices in managing, sharing, securing, and above all analyzing data take place Wednesday and Thursday. Speakers include…a whole lot of people.
Tuesday March 14th
- Microsoft hosts an online launch event for its new Teams solution.
Reader ROI: Microsoft calls Teams a “chat-based workspace” system, partly because calling it “our answer to Slack” doesn’t sound quite as good. Slack, needless to say, has a big head start in the command line-based collaboration product category it pretty much invented, but Microsoft has a big advantage that could fuel a come-from-behind victory: Teams will be available free of charge to anyone who subscribes to the Business Essentials, Business Premium, or Enterprise E1/E3/E5 editions of Office 365. Given the large and growing user base for those plans, Teams could turn out to be the good-enough Slack slayer Microsoft hopes it will be.
- The 2017 AIIM Conference for information management professionals gets underway in earnest in Orlando. It concludes on Thursday.
Reader ROI: The roughly 600 information professionals expected to attend the Association for Information and Image Management’s annual get-together—which technically started with yesterday’s pre-conference sessions—will have access to 60 keynotes and breakout sessions on business process automation, analytics, data governance and security, and more. Sponsors include Box, Brother, ELO Digital Office, Epson, IBM, and Microsoft. Keynoters include Dan Lyons, author of the New York Times best seller Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Startup Bubble, about his experiences working, at age 50, for HubSpot among a building full of millennials.
Wednesday, March 15th
- SaaSMAX hosts the first of four 2017 Cybersecurity Channel Road Show events in Dallas.
Reader ROI: The half-day conference features an “all stuff, no fluff” agenda packed with information on threat detection and remediation solutions, authentication best practices, building a security-as-a-service practice, and more. Oh, and there will apparently be “good food and unlimited beer” available as well. Sign up (fast, before your peers put that unlimited beer promise to the test) here.
- Oracle reports its earnings for the third quarter of its 2017 fiscal year.
Reader ROI: The one-time database and financials king is, like fellow old-school tech giant IBM, furiously re-tooling its product and service lineup for the age of cloud computing. Those efforts appear to be bearing fruit too. While revenues overall were effectively flat in Q2, Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service sales jumped 81 percent year-over-year. Even better for Oracle, that was the fourth straight time the company’s cloud revenue grew faster than in the previous quarter. Let’s see if they keep that momentum building.
Thursday, March 16th
- Your bracket is busted!
Reader ROI: Don’t ask us how we know. We just do.
Friday, March 17th
- It’s Saint Patrick’s Day!
Reader ROI: And we’re feeling tipsy already. The annual feast day for Ireland’s patron saint inspires Irish Americans, people who know Irish Americans, and people who know people who know Irish Americans to alcoholic excess pretty much regardless of what day it occurs. That revelers will have two whole days to sleep off that excess this year suggests we’re in for an especially epic day, evening, and morning of green beer, whiskey, and (heaven help us) Shamrock Juice consumption.
As for us, we’ll be saving up our overindulgences for April 4th, the feast day for the lesser known Saint Isidore of Seville (pictured). And who is he, you ask? Why, the patron saint of computers and the Internet. And why is a man who died 1,386 years ago the patron saint of computers and the Internet, you ask? Because he spent a good part of his life attempting to collect everything known on earth in his 20-volume masterwork, The Etymologies. By hand. With nary a database or search engine to help him. Now that, AIIM Conference and Strata + Hadoop World attendees, is what real commitment to information management looks like.
