Dan2021. What an interesting year. With the world turned upside down by a pandemic that seemingly had its sights set on...
Prognosis: Annual global Kick-Off meeting goes virtual!
IR
Dan
We have heard so much already this year about events going virtual. Given the impact being felt everywhere as the result of the global pandemic, it is not surprising then to read that here at IR we elected to hold our annual company-wide kick-off meeting as a virtual event. HPE called their annual marketing event, HPE Discover Virtual Experience and now that IR has wrapped up our virtual event, it was very much about the experience.
In past years we flew management around the planet such that not all presentations could be heard by all employees. That wasn’t the case this year. Among the many highlights of this three days event were the many humorous occurrences some of which made it to the airwaves. If as yet you haven’t checked out the IR Blooper video posted to LinkedIn, you may want to take a look:
“We’re not always perfect …” may have been the title of this video, but when it comes to more serious conversation, the theme for the week summed it all up – Crush it! “We have had a huge first couple of days hearing from leadership, analysts (William Haskins & Zilvinas Bareisis), solving a phony, funny, money crime, launching new IR Tribe behaviors, watching the Daily Crush. All done virtually.” The company couldn’t gather together in the different locations around the world this year but one highlight from this virtual event was that we could all connect to our global team and this more than makes up for sense of isolation any of our participants may have felt. Clearly, there have been some eventful networking meetings of the past that are fresh in the minds of many, but this wasn’t anything we couldn’t overcome by going virtual.
As for format and content, in subsequent exchanges with Jamie Pearson, Product Manager overseeing Payments and Infrastructure monitoring solutions including Prognosis deployments on HPE NonStop systems, he said, “There was a core 3 hours where all regions were online for live sessions (late for Australia, early for the US). Outside those hours there was pre-recorded on demand content, with follow up live Q&A sessions where needed. It worked pretty well.”
Pearson also touched on the impact from stepping up to a virtual event noting that some content had to be trimmed even as there was less of a social feel, “but surprisingly and somewhat unexpected, it proved to be more focused.” As for the content, “it was focused primarily on Communications and Payments. The NonStop call-outs were around the evolution of the Prognosis platform to “Prognosis-as-a-service,” and the many potential opportunities for IR in this area.
HPE Discover Virtual Experience saw emphasis being directed at Edge-to-Core, delivered as a service. As an option for the NonStop community, this is a direction that we see developing traction not only among the NonStop community but the IT industry at large. As for the emphasis HPE placed on ensuring the cloud experience can be created within the data center where hybrid IT continues to make its presence felt it was just as important to hear HPE declare the industry is entering an age of insight.
This is consistent with our own message for the Prognosis platform and was reflected in the presentations delivered at our Kick Off. As covered in our article in the July issue of NonStop Insider where CEO and Managing Director, John Ruthven, said:
“This is a pivotal moment in our company history. This new platform enables an immensely powerful level of intelligence. For our customers, they’ll be able to realize the potential of our solutions with greater ease and speed. And for the company it allows us to grow our share of markets we currently operate in and expand into new markets more quickly.”
According to Pearson, at our Kick Off, “There are definitely some parallels between the way HPE talks about its platform, and the way we’re thinking about ours where the “platform” is a hybrid of edge and core functionality.” This is a topic about which you will be hearing a lot more from IR and we are looking forward to covering it in more detail for the NonStop community at the upcoming November NonStop event – the annual NonStop Technical Boot Camp.
One outcome from our virtual event worth an additional mention is that we now have created a studio within our IR headquarters where we can produce more material so look for further updates from IR Studios posted on social media channels in the near future.
If you would like to know more about IR’s solutions for Payments and Infrastructure, including NonStop, don’t hesitate to reach out to your local IR contact; they would be only too happy to hear from you.
Kevin Johnson,
VP Sales – Payments Performance Monitoring
www.ir.com
