Wooah! What a day it was!! The summit totally rocked! It was the culmination of weeks of planning, re-planning efforts and also the result of some incredible execution. Mind you, this was organized by the engineering team and we had no event management support whatsoever. Okay – back to how the event went.
I landed up at the venue around 7 AM (man! thats early!) and I already had butterflies in my stomach as I was to be the MC of the event. I have done it few times before but not for a corporate event like this. Coming from an engineering background and being used to make a living writing code, this was an exciting challenge for me. It was incredible to see the folks had already set up the registration desks. The stage looked fantastic and the scene was set for a great event that followed.
The delegates started walking in at 8:30 around and we had a full house around 9:15. The event started at 9:30 AM and we had Ananth, Director of Flex & cold fusion engineering address the crowd with the welcome note. This was followed by a key note session from Naresh Gupta, MD, India R&D center, Adobe talk about the past present and future of RIAs. Naresh’s presentation covered the entire spectrum of how applications evolved through the years.
Then came David Wadhwani – GM & VP of the platform business unit at Adobe. David spoke about Adobe’s platform strategy and how adobe technologies will revolutionize the RIA world in the years to come, just the way it has been all this while! The AIR demos from David’s session kept the audience captivated and I could literally see jaws dropping when the thermo preview video was played. The session rocked and the loud applause testified it!
Ben Forta (Dir Evangelism) came, spoke and he conquered! Ben dint have a PPT at all!! He built applications (not one, but three) Ben’s presentation was racy, super cool and the crowd just loved it! Ben’s fans in this part of the world got a chance to click a few pictures of his, which he graciously obliged.
James ward did a fantastic session on connecting back ends with Flex applications. I was amazed by the speed at which James wrote those applications. The crowd loved his session and James was patient to answer many many questions that folks asked. I did a lot of socializing with the delegates during the lunch time and also managed to shoot some prospective 30 on air videos as well.
The afternoon sessions started with customer showcases from Ivy Comptech, Borland, Business Objects, Instacoll and Cognizant. It was great to see our customers talk about how our technology helped them build successful businesses. James came back and did the session on RIA best practices. This session had an even longer Q & A and James once again was kind enough to answer them all. The “getting the ACT together” session followed, where we had Mr Neil – professor at KMIT talk about the importance of academia in RIA training. Mrinal spoke about the community activities and Himanshu Modi of techpoint multimedia spoke about training.
The last session for the day was AIRkitectur by Sunil and Raghu which also had a mini skit which kept the crowd entertained. We also had a lot of folks getting their Flex 2.0 books autographed by James and many folks getting their pics clicked along with Ben and James. Meet the Flex team and customer stall showcases followed and it was around 7:30 when the summit closed.
Overall, it was a great day and it was fantastic to have James, Ben and David join us for this event. And not to forget the great audience without which this event could have never been such a great success!
