Matt Larder
Head of Cloud, Softcat
Matt Larder Linked In
On Wednesday 6 and Thursday 7 March, Softcat attended Cloud Expo Europe (London). It was an action-packed event with the Softcat Cloud team on the stand across both days, talking to lots of organisations about their objectives in reducing technical debt, getting time back from their cloud investments and reducing cloud waste.
Event themes
Nearly 15,000 IT professionals visited the Expo across both days. The event included many exhibitor stands from software vendors, to resellers, cloud partners and systems integrators. These organisations were there to explain their value in supporting organisations around the core event themes of:
- Cloud-enabled acceleration and innovation – the core agility of cloud is underpinning most, if not all organisations to remove the traditional shackles of IT speed to market. The continued pace of turn-key solution development is also giving lots of organisations the competitive edge.
- Achieving business sustainability with cloud – with sustainability becoming a top priority for many organisations, several questions continue to be asked around the true sustainability of cloud (for the organisations using it but also for the market as a whole).
- People-powered success – exploring the cost vs flexibility of nurturing internal skills vs adopting new partnership models.
- Building and optimising cloud architectures – this theme focused on the decisions being made by many organisations to ensure their cloud investments all work as a cohesive eco-system.
- Resilience, regulation and risk management – focusing on strategies for managing risks, ensuring regulatory compliance, and building resilience into cloud infrastructures. But considering this for all facets of the organisations such as the modern hybrid worker to the systems built in Cloud and users consuming them.
- Cloud-powered business transformation – linked to the first theme, this point explored the resulting changes organisations are seeing in business processes because of adopting cutting edge turn-key cloud solutions.
For Softcat, day two of the Expo was specifically exciting as we hosted our first ever Cloud Expo Panel, featuring Technology Director, Dean Gardner, AI Specialist, Arran Spedding and Microsoft’s Senior Partner Technology Manager, Wendy Carstairs. For 20 minutes, the panel gave a run-down of AI's past, present, and future, provided insight into key market technologies, and finally outlined the areas of adoption and the role Softcat plays in this.
Get in touch
We're keen to discuss how Softcat can support your organisation with getting time back, minimising technical debt and reducing cloud waste during your cloud journey. If you’re having specific conversations around the cost of your cloud use, then please get in touch for Softcat’s free of charge cloud spend optimisation assessment.
Lastly, please watch out for the upcoming AWS Summit, London in April. This is AWS’s flagship UK event, where similarly, Softcat will be on-hand with our own stand and evening event to understand your needs.