Last week I conducted two sessions on a seminar on Virtualization (sorry, most info is in Dutch only) we organized at the headquarters of Sun Microsystems Netherlands. No less than 350 people registered, and then we had to stop the registration because our building cannot fit more bodies. In real, 250 people actually showed up.
The program started of with two general sessions. Martin Hingley of IDC kicked off with a presentation called "Business and technical reasons for virtualization". Then I stood up and talked for 40 minutes on "Virtualization: the whole spectrum", a presentation in which I gave an overview of different virtualization possibilities at the levels of network, application, storage, desktop and servers.
After a short break the program continued with 3 breakout sessions of 3 parallel presentations each. This gave enough time for more in-depth exploration of different areas of virtualization. We had partners like Altiris and Trigence present, sessions by Microsoft and VMWare, and I explained the upcoming SPARC Logical Domains technology to an audience of about 50 people. Too bad (but maybe lucky for me 
) that I had to postpone the demo I prepared for lack of time.
We ended the day with a general session presented by SUNs own Richard Barrington, titled "The Sustainable Datacenter", which to me was an eye-opener. I didn't know SUN was that active in being green!
Parallel on this whole program we had an exhibition with 10 partners (well: nine, and ourselves) showing their solutions. We planned lunch at the exhibition to allow more time for people to get themselves informed, chat, meet and network. This turned out to be a great idea, listening to the feedback after the event from both attendants and partners.
What I learned? Apart from a lot on the 'business side to Virtualization' (thanks, Martin H.) I again learned and saw that sharing is key. Simply because the evaluation forms showed an average rating for the whole event between 7 and 8 on a scale of 10 (with 10 being best ) and the majority indicated that the sheer fact that we brought everything together in terms of technologies, speakers, partners, exhibition... made them decide to come.
Looking forward to share more! Materials on this seminar can be found here.