What to expect from NerdioCon 2024
Straight into Q1 conference season, we dive into a somewhat different type of industry gathering at NerdioCon 2024.
Nerdio is of course a software provider for organisations that want to manage and cost-optimise native Microsoft cloud technologies. The company is highly focused on IT team skills development for Microsoft Azure, Windows 365, Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop and Microsoft Intune among other key technologies.
NOTE: Less well-known than the Azure brand on its own, Microsoft Intune is a cloud-based endpoint management solution designed to handle user access to organisational resources and simplify application and device control/management functions – and, it sits within the Nerdio skills specialisation wheelhouse.
Onward to NerdioCon then, staged from February 12-16 2024 in Punta Cana Dominican Republic, the event is presented for software engineers, business owners and enterprise partners.
As noted here on Computer Weekly, Nerdio CEO Vadim Vladimirskiy has spoken openly about the company name and says his team used to run a Managed Services Provider (MSP) service called Project Nerdio – the company sold off the MSP business but held onto the name.
According to Vladimirskiy and the team, this year’s event (which also ran last year) has been constructed to present technical knowledge at an in-depth level with access to subject matter experts, platform engineering specialists and software evangelists from external organisations alongside Nerdio staff.
Hands-on labs
The conference agenda is driven by experts across multiple areas of Microsoft expertise, (with the aim of) providing as 360-degree a view as possible into how to maximise their IT strategies and Microsoft investments. The event typically runs with a mixture of hands-on labs and workshops where the emphasis is on gaining practical experience with Microsoft cloud technologies to earn certifications.
According to the company’s (sneaky, but clever) auto-download ‘Convince Your Boss’ documentation (one click and it’s on your machine as a .doc ready to go), NerdioCon is an ideal platform to connect with IT professionals and peers from around the world. These connections can open doors to collaboration, knowledge sharing and potential business opportunities.
The event features a vendor exhibit area where approximately 30 technology vendors showcase their latest solutions. There will be approximately 30 vendors in attendance this year. This is a unique opportunity to explore tools and products that could benefit our organization and improve our service offerings.
The object of the event itself, if we boil it down in essence, is to enable companies working with Microsoft cloud to do more with Redmond’s latest native technology base, while, concurrently, being strategic about costs and resources.
How Nerdio works
The Nerdio platform is built to enable in-house IT teams and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to deploy, manage and optimise virtual desktops in Microsoft Azure. A key product/service offering here is Nerdio Manager for Enterprise – this is a packaged Azure application that runs in a user’s own [cloud] tenant without compromising security and compliance by allowing third-party vendors access into the IT environment.
“Nerdio Manager for MSP is an Azure-managed application that enables MSPs to automatically provision a complete virtual desktop environment in Azure in under an hour, connect to an existing deployment in minutes, manage all their clients in a single pane of glass admin portal and optimise their virtual desktop environment with auto-scaling,” notes the company’s technical product documentation.
Nerdio sits on top of the existing Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) service and the company ‘promises’ that this means it doesn’t stand in the way of an organisation’s core Azure cloud investment.
If a customer were to decide to remove Nerdio, the technology’s synced services and environment will continue to run and all data and logs remain. As newer features and improvements are made in the native Azure service, Nerdio users benefit via increased security, better monitoring and in areas like faster virtual machines (VMs).
Speaker & sponsors
Featured speakers at NerdioCon this year include Nerdio CEO & co-founder Vadim Vladimirskiy, CRO and co-founder Joseph Landes plus Amol Dalvi, VP of product at Nerdio and Liz Hoscheid in her capacity as senior director of marketing at Nerdio
Microsoft is of course in attendance with Scott Manchester, director of product management for AVD & Windows 365 at Microsoft alongside Deb Dubrow, group product manager at Microsoft and Joe Whittinghill, corporate VP of talent, learning & insights at Microsoft. This group is also joined by Erwin Visser, general manager of Cloud Service Provider (CSP) strategy and GTM, Microsoft and Jim Moyle, senior program manager at Microsoft.
Other noted speakers include Canalys chief analyst Jay McBain, brand strategist & co-host of the Millennials in Tech podcast Sivan Shachnovitz, CEO and co-founder of ThreatLocker Danny Jenkins and Gabe Knuth, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.
Key sponsors include – and there’s no prize for guessing this one – Microsoft. But aside from that we will also see practitioners in attendance from the previously mentioned ThreatLocker, plus pia, blackpoint, GlassHive, N-able, IT Complete and Intel.
We said ‘somewhat different’ when referencing NerdioCon at the start and – if nothing else – the location of this event certainly qualifies it for such a classification the Computer Weekly Developer Network team expectantly hopes for the same to be true in relation to the content.
As well as now being well-known for hosting Microsoft cloud optimisation and operational excellence events, the Dominican Republic is also known for being roughly one-half of the island of Hispaniola which it shares with Haiti. Let’s see what else we can uncover at the event itself.
