System Center Universe DACH 2013

This week was a great week! I was impressed on so many levels, I have to dedicate a blog post about probably the best System Center focused conference in the German speaking area: System Center Universe DACH (which basically mean German, Austria and Switzerland).

The Location

The event took place at the BERN EXPO Congress in Bern/Switzerland. On Sunday we (the organizers and most of the speakers) had some time to walk through the beautiful city of Bern and got a small sight-seeing tour. On Monday and Tuesday we had about 40 breakout sessions on 4 parallel tracks – all about System Center!

Almost 300 people from 17 countries attended and it was just great. I attended a lot of conferences and events in Europe and besides the fact that this is System Center focused, it’s probably the best event I ever attended here in Europe! Kudos to the guys at itnetx – those guys actually made this highly professional and perfectly organized event happen!

I was very impressed with the quality, precision and execution of the event from all speakers, sponsors, participants and foremost the organizers. This is – by all means – Swiss precision! We had great parties, excellent food and best of all great content and discussions. At the sponsor booths you could see great solutions for System Center from well known industry leaders like veeam, OpsLogix, cireson, Provance and even brand new products, first shown in public like the promising Self-Service Portal for SCSM from SYLIANCE.

The Sessions

As a System Center guy by heart, it’s needless to say that I very much enjoyed all the sessions I could attend. It was tough though because of the 4 parallel tracks, I missed some of the sessions.

The keynote (by Travis Wright) was all about cloud computing with a clear message that cloud computing isn’t about location of data and services. It’s all about a specific method of computing. Travis nailed it. He was able to not only show us the vision of cloud computing from Microsoft’s perspective, he was also able to clarified some myths around “the cloud”. I think this was an eye-opener for many attendees (me included!).

Besides Travis, a lot of well known “rock stars” in the System Center community presented high quality content. Local experts (Marcel Zehner, Stefan Roth, Thomas Maurer, and many more) as well as experts from all over Europe (Andreas Baumgarten, Kevin Greene, Damian Flynn, Maarten Goet, and many, many more) presented great content. Most impressive: we even had presenters from the U.S.! Cameron Fuller, Pete Zerger, Chris Ross just to name a few.

Not only was I able to watch the pro’s deliver their content, I also had the honor to present at this great event. I had a lot of fun, especially talking in Dutch (inside joke!). No no, I presented in German; although, I’m not sure how much of it was actually German. Cameron Fuller attended my session without knowing one word of German and understood everything.

SCU (DACH) 2014

There are (so far) two SCU events in 2014: End of January in Houston, TX and September 8th, 9th somewhere in Switzerland/Europe. If you are interested in System Center related topics, this is the event to go to. Since MMS is now officially “dead”, this is the only System Center focused event and the fact that you can attend those events in the U.S. and/or Europe is an additional bonus. I’m looking forward to see more!

To itnetx and the Organizers

As you can read, I’m very enthusiastic about my time at SCU DACH. I had a blast, it was mind-blowing and I had fun. I personally want to thank itnetx, the Organizers, especially Marcel Zehner for having me as a speaker, taking good care of us all and for making all this happen. I’ve never written about an event and I’m afraid my words (as English is only my second language) doesn’t do it justice. Keep on rocking! Can’t wait for the Return of the (SCU) Jedi!

cheers,
Stefan