Virtual IOUG Collaborate 13 for only $299

For only $299 you can access Virtual IOUG Collaborate 13 individually or setup a conference room at your company for the whole team. There will be two tracks broadcasted so if you have demand for both tracks, it make sense to purchase two access passes and setup two tracks broadcasted in parallel in your office so that members of your team can choose individually what to attend. I think that’s a steal even if you want to purchase this package individually.

Virtual attendance doen’t completely replace the physical presence but if you can’t come to Denver in April, this is the next best thing. Relationships that you gain from meeting your peers and speakers face to face are extremely valuable and you will cary them throughout your whole career. I’ve been just recently discussing with Rene Antunez (who’s just joined Pythian) how social media and twitter revolutionized our professional networking, and we agreed that things like Twitter alone won’t cut it for many of us. While some folks only know most of their peers online, the real relationships are established face to face — discussing a presentation with the speaker during lunch, sharing a drink at the reception or having a heated discussion in a pub near the convention center. With such relationships, social media becomes a natural extended communication channel.

But I digress… so those of you who can’t come to Denver for one reason or another, do consider taking Virtual IOUG Collaborate 2013 Pass and enjoy the session in tracks “High Availability, Disaster Recovery, Manageability” and “Performance, Scalability and Internals”. Here are some of the speakers you would have a chance to see over 4 days of sessions broadcasting:

• Kuassi Mensah, Oracle
• John Beresniewicz, Oracle
• Michael Abbey, Pythian
• Yury Velikanov, Pythian
• Craig Shallahamer, OraPub
• Karl Arao, Enkitec
• Carlos Sierra, Oracle
• Mark W Farnham, Rightsizing
• Guy Harrison, Dell
• Frits Hoogland, VX Company
• Tim Gorman, Evergreen Database Technologies
• Kyle Hailey, Delphix
• Gwen Shapira, Pythian

My favorite virtual track is Performance, Scalability and Internals but I will be at the conference physically so I will also be attending lots of sessions on Big Data and Data Science. By the way, as virtual attendee, you will get access to the recordings as well so even if you miss certain session live, you can watch it later at your convenience.

If your team is dispersed geographically, the members would need a pass each to watch broadcast live but, again, I still think it’s a steal at $299!

Looking forward to see some of you in Denver and some of you on Twitter talking about what you saw at the virtual conference. If you don’t come to Denver and not going to be virtual attendee — tell me why and what else can we do to plug you into Collaborate — I will relay your message to the IOUG Board of Directors and the Conference Committee.