A team of 14 Chef’s made the trek to balmy Atlanta along with 24,000+ customers and partners to participate in Microsoft Ignite, September 26th – 29th. It was a busy and fun-filled week participating in Microsoft’s largest event of the year.
The keynotes and sessions were very informative. We were excited to showcase our integration and support for Azure Stack, Azure Marketplace, Operations Management Suite, Windows Server 2016 and Nano Server.
From our booth in the Expo Hall, we handed out 1,000 stickers, 500 t-shirts and 300 coffee tumblers to attendees. Guests at our booth were eager to discuss how Chef can help with datacenter transformations and hybrid or cloud projects using Azure.
In addition to this quick trial, we also had two Azure Launch and Learn sessions down the hall. Bakh Inamov and one of our systems integrator partners, Sysgain, led a one-hour hands-on lab that featured Chef Automate on Azure. There was so much interest that we had to add a second class!
Chef got some great plugs from Microsoft product teams during their sessions. For example, Jason Zander’s general session,“Reinvent IT infrastructure for business agility”. We were one of the early partners working to make Chef available for syndication on Azure Stack.
We had a great dinner at JCT Kitchen & Bar in Midtown Atlanta where we enjoyed amazing food and wine with several key customers including Aarons and Oppenheimer. We love to spend time connecting with our customers and hearing first hand about their experience using Chef.
The Ignite conference got all of us at Chef even more amped up about the amazing things we are doing with Microsoft! We have built strong technical integrations for customers that are on-prem with Windows Server 2016, moving to the cloud with Azure, or running in a hybrid environment. We are working very closely with the Microsoft field team to drive joint customer design wins that help them speed up their cloud deployments.
We’ll be doing several webcasts and in-person events throughout the next year. Hopefully you will be able to listen in or participate in a city near you!