Sql Saturday #70

bobby    Community, Sql Saturday    

South Carolina is not necessarily the tech-hub of the Southeast. That being said, it’s also not quite the backwater that some people make it out to be. Between Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina’s over 2,500 IT employees, SCANA’s 400+ ITS professionals, various colleges, and other enterprises there is a growing community of IT professionals and technologists. This growth has spurred awareness of and the need to develop and nurture the budding community. Efforts (Innoventure Southeast, the CESM, and others) have already seen some success in bringing in entrepreneurs and obtaining the attention of many high technology companies, including Google and Boeing. On the heels of these successes and in an effort to build a grassroots effort to provide training, professional development, and networking opportunities to those individuals in the field, certain community leaders stepped up to provide a venue in the form of Code Camps and Sql Saturdays. With the help of other successful community leaders, this group was able to have a fantastic opening year in 2010. Moving into 2011, we plan on doing it again, only bigger and better!

Event details

Sql Saturday #70 is planned for March 19th, 2011 – the weekend following St. Patrick’s Day. As with last year, we plan on holding this event at the airport campus of Midlands Tech. This venue worked out really well last year and everyone seemed to really enjoy it there.

Planning

Putting on an event like this is tough, but with the right team, a great pool of speakers, and gracious sponsors, it does not have to be as hard as you might imagine. There is a great deal of planning and preparation involved in putting these events together. Luckily, once you have one or two under your belt, it gets – well, not necessarily easier, but less stressful.

Why should you go?

Why shouldn’t you go? Ok, cliche’s aside, there are a lot of great reasons to go:

1. Business Intelligence (BI) is huge. Gartner forecasts a 9.7% growth in the BI industry, reaching $10.8 billion this year. We will be having 3 tracks dedicated to this particular area. Each of our speakers are recognized industry leaders, authors, and consultants.
2. For those of you wishing to grow your network, check out the networking page (http://sqlsaturday.com/70/networking.aspx). If you are just getting started, I would suggest choosing two people from the list, doing a little research (twitter, blogs, etc.), then geting to know them. If you need an introduction come find me and I would be more than happy to provide one or two.
3. For those who prefer to remain anonymous and simply want to take in some great sessions – stop in and expand your horizons by getting to know a new technology. A few speakers will be doing “deep-dives” into some of the more obscure (but no less critical) capabilities of information management technology.

Speakers

I was planning on doing a run-down on some of the great speakers we have coming in for the event. But with over 40 speakers submitting sessions, I would rather redirect you to the great run-down of what it took to make our schedule happen written by Brian Kelley, Speaker Chair for Sql Saturday #70: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/blogs/brian_kelley/archive/2011/02.aspx.

Sponsors

Our sponsors really came through for us this year. Redgate, Quest, Confio, PASS, SqlSentry, Fusion-IO, Intellinet, CozyRoc, and Mariner – just to name a few are doing their part to make this a great event. Stop by their tables and talk to them for a bit. You would be amazed by what you can learn about what and who’s hot in IT by speaking with the vendors.

I really do look forward to seeing everyone there. I always make new friends when I attend an event like this and I look forward to making some more on March 19, see you there!

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