I had the opportunity to be at IP EXPO last week, in London. For those of you who are not familiar with the event, IP EXPO Europe took place at ExCel London (5-6 October 2016).
The interesting fact about IP Expo is that you can find vendors and services across the whole spectrum related to IT. More specifically, under one roof you will find anything you need related to Cloud and Cloud services, Cyber Security, network and infrastructure solutions, data analytics, DevOps, and Open Source.
Compared to InfoSecurity Europe, it is a smaller event but this ended up being good. The exhibitors had a standard booth size allocation and it was much easier to get around, talk to people and faster to find what you were looking for. Maybe it made more sense this particular layout to my OCD I guess.
I know most of the companies in security and cybersecurity as I part of this industry for more than fifteen years now, and it was very interesting to have the opportunity to familiarise myself with so many other exhibitors (for example Cloud services or data analytics). I like to ask question when I go to these events, and I suppose this is why they are there, to allow the visitors to get to know the company and familiarise with their product(s). As always, some exhibitors do a very good job in explaining what their product(s) do and they are ready to take upon the technical and difficult questions.
What I noticed though at IP EXPO Europe this year, it was the appearance of what people refer to as "booth babes" (I am referring to both male and female). Definitely, not the event's fault, but a couple of vendors seem like they did not get the message over the years that this is not appropriate in these kind of events (well, it is not suppose to be a cosplay exhibition after all).
Other than that, the event went really smoothly, with a number of talks happening at the same time and a secret after-party what only a handful of people knew about! :D
Toward the end of the day, I stopped at Tintri's booth, which in case you do not know, it is a company that has been named as a visionary in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays. After the badge scanning and the introductions, I was asked if I wanted to participate in their prize-draw and get a chance to win a drone. I rarely enter this kind of prize-draws but this one came with a twist. Basically, in order to participate in the prize draw you were suppose to do a tweet about the company by taking a selfie. I had no clue what kind of drone it was at the time, but the people I was chatting were very polite and really professional, so, I decided to give it a go. 
Long story short, we took a selfie and posted on Twitter. It only took a few seconds before people started re-tweeting the photo, but I believe it was because Zap and Katie look awesome in the photo. :)
The really good news arrived the next day, when I found out that I had won the drone! I was planning on getting one and I was happy about getting one to play with, even though I did not know what kind of drone it was yet.
Tintri contacted me directly and asked for my delivery address and said that the drone will be at my door step on Tuesday. Indeed, the deliver arrived on time as scheduled and it was a large box, which made me feel that the drone is going to be a really nice one. I opened the box and I was really impressed with the drone in it. It was a Parrot AR.DRONE 2.0 Power Edition that comes with two 36 minutes batteries and has a camera as well that streams to your phone!
Thank you @Tintri_EMEA for this amazing drone and I will definitely see you again at a future event.
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