Last week Veeam held their second VeeamOn Conference in Las Vegas at the Aria Resort and Casino. Before the event kicked off last Sunday I wrote a post on my expectations and session recommendations…glad to report that the week was a success and Veeam certainly know how to organize and execute an event.

Before going into my thoughts around the actual event I wanted to comment on Vegas given this was my first time to Sin City. In a nutshell Vegas is total madness and walking around Sunday afternoon before the party I realized that everything people say about Vegas was true… it’s a true party town filled with everything to the excess …which is fine by me but I can see how it would be a distraction to conference attendees if you allow it. Vegas has a different vibe to San Francisco but the one great thing over conferences I’ve attended in SFO is that everything is self contained within the casino which means easier access to the exhibition center and therefore access to sessions and content.

Sunday saw registrations open, the launch of the VCME training sessions and The Welcome Party held poolside at the Aria which was well attended but most people seemed to arrive on the Monday was also Partner Day and saw the opening of the Exhibition Hall and official opening of the event. The sponsors as you would expect in one way or another where promoting storage and services that compliment Veeam’s product suite. It seemed like there where a few Cloud Connect Service Providers which is a great testament to Veeam listening to SPs who wanted an easier way for clients to backup to the cloud.

During the day on the Monday the Veeam Vanguards where treated to a special half day of presentations from members of the Executive, Evangelist, Marketing, Support and Product teams which was extremely insightful and I tip my hat off to Rick and the rest of the Vanguard team for organizing a great days worth of content, thought and discussion.

Thanks to all of the inaugural #VeeamVanguard for joining us at #VeeamON! Cheers! pic.twitter.com/rPfnsoCunj

— VeeamVanguard (@VeeamVanguard) October 29, 2015

Tuesday morning (seemed like I had been at the event for ages) saw the Opening Keynote in the main hall which was one of the best opening keynotes I’ve experienced in all my times going to VMware and Microsoft conferences. Ratmir got on stage with Richard Laible and was interviewed in a somewhat awkward manner…but during the interview lifted the lid on Veeam’s major announcement around Endpoint Backup for Linux Free Edition. That was followed by the Veeam All Stars doing a quad demo live on stage in what was a ballsy move that worked really well and acted as a vehicle to show off some of the major new features in the v9 of Backup and Replication.

Lastly Veeam held a customer panel featuring Zettagrid and my COO Nicholas “Max” Power which involved the panel being interviewed on their thoughts on technology trends and what they thought the future might hold. This was a proud moment for me to have Zettagrid up on stage all due to the great work we have done with Veeam in being names Cloud Service Provider of the year for the ANZ region. I finished off the day by attending the Veeam ANZ dinner and having a great time catching up with Veeam ANZ team members and other customers from the ANZ region.

Though the next couple of days I attended a sessions and tried to network as much as possible before setting off for the big party at Omnia Night Club at Caesars Palace…Veeam are know at VMworld’s for their great parties and this VeeamOn party was seriously off the carts! Between the amazing food, drinks, music and girls the night was amazing and I know that everyone who attended had one of the best conference party experiences bar none! I know that (as responsibly as humanly possible) many people ended up kicking on afterwards and the Aria Lobby bar was the place to be right up until the early hours of the morning.

With about 3 hours sleep under my belt I got up, demolished breakfast and organized a late checkout before heading out to the closing keynote which featured William Shatner. William was amazingly incitful and held his own for about 45 minutes on stage being interviewed and being asked about his career, influencers and then commented about humanity in general…the take away for me and Shatners closing remarks was that we are heading into a truly amazing time when it comes to science but humanity need to start valuing life in general and the planet we live on…science advancement much go hand in hand with sustainability and respect.

With that deep and meaningful thought out of the way Ratmir came back onto the stage with the whole VeeamOn team and announced that that would be no VeeamOn in 2016…but the next VeeamOn would be in 18 months in New Orleans! So with that VeeamOn was over and we started the long long trip home. Once again thank you to Veeam and a special thanks to the VanGuard team for hosting us and treating the group as royalty.