I attended IPExpo 09 (7-8 October 2009, Earls Court 2, London) with high hopes of learning great things about the future direction of Cloud Computing, Virtualisation and new ways of doing bold things. I could have missed all the "Blue Sky" brain power output by turning up too late for the Key Note speech due to a delayed train. Having suffered from the effects of signal failure due to some country boy taking out a signal with a shotgun. But, of the half dozen seminars I did attend, only one took any sort of view of doing things in a new and different way. All the rest were either shameless sales pitches or trying to make good of using the latest IT to paper over the cracks in the last thing we did wrong. There was a presentation where the presenter portrayed himself as a hero for being able to plug his laptop into the web and getting a copy of a presentation he didn’t have for a meeting he was supposed to be at. Super that he used the all that IT to save the day but why wasn’t he at the meeting, with his presentation to hand, in the first place. Calendar not working? Then another presentation about saving loads of money and of course trees, by consolidation seven racks of servers into two. This was only really possible as the original servers weren’t doing much work anyway. So how did this proliferation of idle server get to happen in the first place? We really should stop claiming wins when at best we only scrapped a draw. A why oh why is every last thing now a "Technology"? All you have to do is to making some old bit of rubbish carry on working by adding some new stuff to it and yet another "Technology" is born. I know time must be spent fixing and maintaining the old but I don’t wee why its "new" to do this. This has always been done. I just wanted to see some white heat stuff because that's how the whole event had been marketed.

Overall 2 out of 5.