PDC'09 and Lokad

PDC'09 has ended. It has been a great time for me, and probably an even greater time for my own small company considering the outrageous amount of exposure that we have received from Microsoft. This post is probably the least that I can do to thank all the Microsoft folks that have made PDC'09 such a great event for us.

First of all, I would like to thank Doug Hauger (General Manager, Windows Azure) who actually made our venue possible under a very constrained time-line but also under a very constrained budget. In order to make sure I wouldn’t get lost (my first time in Los Angeles), Thomas Serval gave me a ride from the airport to my hotel. Who said Microsoft did not care about its partners? :-)

Then Michele Johnson and Arnaud Gstach spend litteraly hours to introduce me to loads of key people. In particular, Michele managed to get me in the Underground PDC where Julien Codorniou, in turn, introduced me to even more people. On the PR side, Dan’l Lewin did a tremendous job at introducing Lokad for a whole series of 1-to-1 meetings with the press (Dan’l, thanks for being so positive, I will make sure that Lokad stands up to the praise that we’ve received).

Then, it was a lot of fun to met with all Microsoft folks, in particular Steve Marx, Mike Wickstrand, Ben Riga, Bob Baker, Kevin Leneway, Juergen Daiberl, Rodney Bowen-Wright, David Appel, Matthew Kerner, Prashant Ketkar and Aashish Dhamdhere, Stephanie Selin, and more…

Yet, I am not religious, I did appreciate the company of non-Microsoft folks as well such as Chris Auld, Andy Lapin and David Chappel especially for all their sharp insights concerning the design of scalable apps on top of Windows Azure (sorry, for missing many of people here, in particular all the ones who ran out of business cards).