As anyone who follows me on Twitter or has been within a quarter-mile of me the last month will know, I spent the last week in San Francisco with Juniper Networks for their Tech Summit at the Executive briefing centre in Sunnyvale California. Although I’ve been around the world a “bit” this was my first time in Silicon valley and the US. We were very lucky with the weather and it was warm and bright most of the week. The main event was a couple of days long so we had plenty of downtime.  I travelled west with three colleagues from the UK; amazingly before meeting in Terminal 5 none of our paths had crossed, so much for it being a small industry I guess!

By flying out earlier we actually got a chance to explore the city somewhat and recover from the inevitable jet-lag. This meant that we were fresh for the main event; the briefing in the Telsa room (I’m guessing named after the scientist and not the car named after the scientist). Sadly I can’t say too much about what we were briefed on as needless to say; I’m NDA’d up the wazoo.  Suffice it to say that all the major Juniper business units were represented and there is some very cool stuff shipping in the coming months.

One interesting aspect was the Ambassadors themselves; 15 out of 17 were able to make the event and represented a broad cross section of resellers, partners, consultants and end-users.  To say that everyone had an opinion and everyone wanted to share is somewhat an understatement, but the discussions were lively and productive.  Hearing about other organisations and their use-cases was really interesting. This was especially true of the end-users with unique problems they’ve addressed with Juniper technology.  Needless to say I took copious notes and googled a lot of things as we went just to keep up, especially when talking about high-end switching and DevOps (not areas I’m intimately familiar with).  If there was one thing I took away from the event (apart some terrific memories and new friendships) was that I need to learn/remember how to program again.  Like Garlic Bread, DevOps is clearly the future of what we do, regardless of which vendor we work with and who we do it for.

Steve Puluka, James Hartig, Pierre-Yves Maunier, Ben Dale, David Roy, Julie Wider, Colin Hostert, Kireeti Kompella, Glen Kemp, Martin Brown, Perry Young, Nick Ryce, Ashton Bothman, Kurt Bales, Scott D Ware, and Keith Rinaldo