One of the first big events of this new year will be the Dell Storage Forum (the first Dell’s European storage show) during the second week of January (9-12). This event was partly born from the hashes of C-Drive (Compellent trade show) that was supposed to have its first European incarnation last year but due to the acquisition of Compellent by Dell C-Drive got canceled and Dell Storage Forum was born instead conveying all things storage by Dell in a single storage-focused event.

The last event day has started at 8 AM with the general sessions “Efficient IT – Shifting from Operation to Innovation” with Stephen Murdoch (VP & GM of Public and Large Enterprise, EMEA).

In my opinion, this was the best general session of the entire event, maybe with a less impact compared with the one yesterday morning, with a lot of interesting points, like:  “Dell is focusing on people & process not just the technology”, “17% of IT hardware is storage 60% of storage cost is labour “, “shadow IT is when users just go out and do stuff to get it done”, “Unavailable IT complexity must be handle with automation/cloud or must become strategic”.

Also a new website and project has been announced: a unique space where IdeaStorm visitors like you can take part in hyper-focused idea-generating sessions. For more information see http://www.ideastorm.com/

The rest of the day was covered, as yesterday, by parallel sessions (some of them were a repeat of a previous one, but other were also more deep in technical details) and also the Hand-on Labs (pretty good the Equallogic related labs).

Finally, in the afternoon, I went away to go back.