The M Resort and Casino
Earlier this month Datawatch revived their annual User Conference, which was last held in 2008. Well, sort of.
It was held in Las Vegas at the absolutely beautiful M Resort and Casino, and I was privileged to once again get together with the Datawatch group and fellow customers. It was a bit of a shell of its former self though, to be honest, as not enough of those who indicated that they wanted to attend could do so. I’m told that many reported that since the conference hadn’t been previously included as a part of their company’s budgeted expenditures for this fiscal year, they couldn’t get approval to attend.
Datawatch elected to continue on with the event, transforming what was originally scheduled for two full days into a single day, along with a reception the evening before. It was terrific meeting many new faces, and catching up with old friends as well.
The morning consisted of Monarch training sessions, and in the afternoon there were presentations by my good friend Olly Bond (on managing Monarch), Datawatch’s Phil Lafond and Phil Storey (on Monarch Enterprise Server, and Data Pump, respectively) and an “Ask the Experts/Developers” session led by Datawatch’s Harvey Gross, Gareth Horton, Mark Kyre, and Jim Ward.
The afternoon wrapped up with a “Monarch Show and Tell” session with great contributions from users Tony Ferraro, Rebekah Tyrell and Tracy Williams.
All in all, it was a very good day. During the morning training sessions, I got the sense that many in attendance learned a fair bit about using Monarch in a relatively brief time. In the afternoon, there was a lot of content presented and it’s likely that we can look forward to seeing exciting new products and developments from Datawatch in the near future.
I suspect that Datawatch got some good feedback from their customers about what sort of content that they would like to have included in future conferences, when they return to their full form.
I hope that you’ll plan now to attend the 2013 User Conference to learn many new ways with which you can excel with Monarch!
