I spent a couple of days this week at the Storage Decisions conference in New York, but this note isn’t about the intricacies of the vendors, attendees, applications or discussions, but instead about the conference itself. More precisely, it’s about doing battle with any city when there’s a big event on.
The event this week is that the UN is in session, and that – just to add to the fun – President Obama addressed the meeting (the UN, not Storage Decisions!) on Wednesday. Additionally, some guy called Bill Clinton had an event right by the conference hotel, which was, as years past, the Hilton on Avenue of the Americas.
So here’s the good news – I can categorically assure you that there are a lot of police in New York! An abundance it seemed. They have access to miles of wooden and plastic barricades and also can call up a lot of friends in dark suits with curly wire growing out of their ears. The bad news is that it makes getting around a tad more challenging than usual- I spent over 90 minutes in a taxi from La Guardia, only for my driver – profusely apologetic – to give up after fruitless concentric circles around the Hilton and leave me to walk.
The decisions for Storage Decisions?
1) Any chance of meeting when the UN are not in town? I know the clash has happened before, and yet I can’t imagine that many of the delegates that I saw being escorted around insiren-esconced speed and comfort were actually rushing from their matters of state to ensure they didn’t miss a moment of my solid state presentation! I think the UN usually announces its schedule well in advance so it shouldn’t be hard to avoid it?
2) Knowing that avoiding large crowds and meetings of some sort in NYC is about as likely as avoiding ’shifting paradigms’ at a storage conference (in other words, not very likely at all) perhaps TechTarget could move it to a time that coincides with some event that’s a bit more interesting than watching darkened SUV’s whizz by? It had just been Fashion Week in New York – mightn’t that be more fun than a whole host of police telling us we can’t cross the street? Imagine the melee when the regular fashionistas get muddled in with and confused with the corporate polo- and chino-clad storage wonks!
I’ll try to get back to TBs, throughput and TCO for my next blog…
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