Smart Grid Summit: Quick Thoughts

I’ve been wanting to post my thoughts since our Smart Grid Summit kicked off Wednesday morning.

 

It really has been a blur, but as blurs go, this is pretty good. I’m actually wearing two hats at this event – both the co-chair of the Smart Grid Summit, and the more established hat as an indie telecom/tech analyst under the J Arnold & Associates banner. Sometimes it’s easy to wear both, but my priority really has been the summit, since it’s a new and promising venture for both myself and TMC (News - Alert).

 

We’ve been through the first two days, and I’d say the summit has been a success on all fronts. Right now, I can only share my top of mind impressions. There’s simply too much going on to give you a more complete picture – and I mean that literally. I’ve taken my share of photos, but I won’t be able to post those for a couple of days – but I will definitely do this.

 

Back to the summit. TMC has provided a fair bit of coverage already – some being formal, and some informal – especially via Rich Tehrani’s posts – both text based and video. When things settle down, I’ll share all this in a more comprehensive recap, but for now, I can only pass along my overall impressions.

 

We started the summit Tuesday morning, and if you weren’t there, the sessions were standing room only. They started out this way, and have stayed this way, even after dragging in all the spare chairs we could find. There’s no doubt we’ll need a bigger room for the next summit. This is, of course, a nice problem to have, and I’m happy to say we’re not alone. TMC is running a few other new events, namely the telecom startup camp and cloud summit, and all have been very well attended.

 

Our summit sessions have been full all the way through, and it’s great to see so much sustained interest. Most attendees are staying put through all the sessions, and the level of engagement has been high for every session. It’s clear to me that all of our panels could have been twice as long, and nobody would be getting bored. We know we’re catching a wave here, and are taking careful notice of what the audience is keying in on. I’m happy to say the quality of our sessions and speakers has been consistently high, and we have a solid foundation to take this event to the next level in Los Angeles.

 

For those of you who haven’t been with us, you’ve been missing some great speakers, presentations and passion for smart srid. Our first summit last September was a nice litmus test, but we know now for sure that our hypothesis for doing this is event is valid. We believe we have a strong value proposition to bring the worlds of energy, telecom and IT under one roof, and I’m hearing a lot of agreement about that here.

 

I have a backlog of references to coverage of our sessions, and will share those with you next time around. Until then, if you search around TMC’s website a bit, you’ll come across most of these on your own. For now, all I can say is that our sessions have come off as expected, and if you wanted a good primer on what all the fuss is about with smart grid, this was the place to do it. So, yes, if you weren’t there, you missed out on some great content, and more importantly, some great networking. I’m sure that anybody here will tell you that the time spent between the sessions talking to everyone else has been just as valuable as seeing the presentations – all of which have been very good. I would argue that anyone attending has gotten their money’s worth, and we still have one day to go.

 

There’s lots more to share with you, but despite my best intentions, there’s only so much time in the day, and only so much access to broadband. I just wanted to get the word out to you now that the summit has met and in many cases, exceeded expectations. I’ll share as much of the good vibes as possible here as time allows, and until then, please look around on TMC’s main site for their ITEXPO coverage, especially the Show Daily.