Data Content Blog

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Last week HDS held its inaugural Influencer Summit in San Jose, California. It was a very big deal for our company, not to mention our invited guests, who by all accounts were about to get the one, two punch! (In a good way).

The creation and preparations for this historic event were driven by our marketing group and trusted advisors, not to mention half the company (well it seemed that way, I may be over exaggerating a little bit). We had our executives on hand to deliver the core messaging with some great insights, as well as folks from The Office of Technology and Planning. This was our first of many events which will enable HDS to share its strategy and technologies within an exclusive (for now anyway) invitation to the industries’ most prestigious analysts and bloggers.

There were many internal meetings to discuss our individual participation and also to cover each presenters’ topics, strategy materials, presentations, NDA clarification, blood type, first born, and dare I forget that I had to sign my name in secret ink (I am kidding, there was no secret ink).

All kidding aside, it was a great event.  Jack Domme (pictured above) was first to present, and he did a great job as always. (I will save the remaining details for my fellow colleagues and bloggers, who I am sure will do it better justice than I can).

One of the initiatives at the event was to decide who would be monitoring Twitter and responding. I of course volunteered, as did many of my peers and colleagues. The job was easy enough, as I am on Twitter (@FTWilkinson) as much as I can, and also I like to see instant feedback from our customers and peers in real-time.

As the event started off, the Twitter chatter was quiet, but started to pick up rather quickly with some tweets pointing out that HDS is the best kept secret…

• @seepij: If you thought #HDS were just into storage – like I did – hearing impressive insights on new technology coming #hdsday
• @CIOmatters: #HDS much more innovative and strategic than I realised -not content buying IP they build it and use/re-use it, ahead of the market #hdsday
• @nigelpoulton: Randy Demont saying customers are really pleased but telling HDS that they dont market well enough <– only for the last 10+ years! #hdsday
• @ekhnaser: Great message at #hdsday but y limited to 70 people? This should be heard by more partners customers influencers….

Ahem!…The presentations were great and overall were well received—at some level I think we shocked some folks by our candor as well as laying out our strategy and some possible future areas of focus and technologies (all covered under NDA, so no sharing in this blog forum). Nonetheless, the Summit was a great inaugural event that proved to those in attendance that we, HDS, do have a complete strategy, and a plan and vision for carrying them out.

So, YES, we do that!

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