Written by John Hickson
As the founding member of StudioSysAdmins, I found myself very fortunate to be invited to the first-ever Gestalt IT event - Tech Field Day! This event brought many of the Gestalt IT authors as well as other like-minded folks to Silicon Valley on November 12 and 13, 2009 for a live, in-person event with some interesting and innovative companies. During the two schedule packed day, sponsors had the opportunity to have thier top engineers and developers present their technology and products to our group. During these presentation we had the chance to ask some hard questions about their technology and offer direct feedback. This was not a trade show or an event that was open to the general public, nor was it open to the traditional media. This event was strictly for IT people that participate heavily in Social Media activities on the Internet.
I have been to Silicon Valley many time before, but this is the first time I have had the opportunity to visit several of the presenting companies offices and see what they had to offer, learned some detailed "secret sauce" on how the products work (and were intended to be usesd), play with the technology and discuss our finding with their engineers, developers and marketing people. I also got to meet a lot of people that have been blogging and twittering about different technologies for some time. I learn a great deal about some new and upcoming technology products during the even. I also learned a lot about the impact that Social Media has brought change on how the word gets out to help market products and companies.
In the next few weeks, I plan on posting several blog entries on StudioSysAdmins to share the information I gathered with everyone.
The Sponsors of the event which gave us presentations and some hands-on time with their products include:
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Delegates which attended the event and are blogging and twittering about everything they learned include:
| Name | Website(s) | Twitter ID | Name | Website(s) | Twitter ID | |
| Rich Brambley | VM /ETC Gestalt IT |
RBrambley | John Obeto | Absolutely Windows | JohnObeto | |
| Carlo Costanzo | VMware Info | CCostan | Devang Panchigar | StorageNerve Gestalt IT |
StorageNerve | |
| Chris Evans | The Storage Architect Gestalt IT |
ChrisMEvans | Nigel Poulton | Ruptured Monkey | NigelPoulton | |
| Greg Ferro | EtherealMind Gestalt IT |
EtherealMind | Bas Raayman | Renegade’s Technical Diatribe | BasRaayman | |
| Robin Harris | StorageMojo | StorageMojo | Ed Saipetch | Breathing Data Gestalt IT |
EdSai | |
| Rod Haywood | Musings of Rodos | Rodos | Simon Seagrave | TechHead | Kiwi_Si | |
| John Hickson | StudioSysAdmins | StudioSystems | Rick Vanover | Virtualization Review Tech Republic |
RickVanover | |
| Greg Knieriemen | Storage Monkeys | Knieriemen |
If you are interested in finding out more about the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day event or what the other delegates thought I encourage you to check out their websites, blogs, and tweets. Most of these guys have been writing about IT trends and issues for some time and they have a lot of valuable information to share.