Thank you to everyone who participated in RICON 2014 and helped make it a meaningful and highly successful event! RICON and Riak have come a long way in the past few years and we are excited to see how RICON continues to grow moving forward.

We’ve done a preliminary review of our post conference survey and we are extremely pleased with the positive response. Often mentioned as a positive was the ability to meet with like-minded professionals and discuss distributed systems. Most attendees appreciated the session mix and balance of academia and industry talks. Use case presentations were also very well received. One standout session that received universal praise was Peter Alvaro’s keynote titled “Outwards from the Middle of the maze,” with one responder saying that this presentation alone made the conference worth the entire trip. In terms of a venue, for RICON 2014 Vegas had a mixed response but generally people were very flattering about the venue, organization and food. My team, with the assistance of Mindshare PR, is to be commended.

RICON 2014 featured more than 30 speakers from both industry and academia, from organizations such as AdRoll, Cloudsoft, Comcast, Google, HP, IBM, Riot Games, Seagate, UC Berkeley and more. For two days they discussed trends, innovations and best practices for running distributed systems in production, as well as, gave predictions and insight on what the future might hold.

This was our first unified RICON event for the U.S. and we couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. Check out the photo gallery on riak.com.

Of course, RICON would not have been possible without our amazing sponsors. Special thanks to HP, IBM, AdRoll, Asynchrony, Citrix, Cloudsoft, Erlang Solutions, Eucalyptus, Lilien Systems, Pivotal, and Seagate, and to our media sponsors InfoQ, The New Stack and O’Reilly Media for all the support!

So, what’s next for RICON? We’re planning RICON 2015 for Seattle, so keep an eye on riak.com and our blog for more details.

If you have any additional feedback on RICON or Build a Cloud Day, feel free to contact us at ricon@riak.com – we’d love to hear from you.

Hope to see you all again next year!

Peter Coppola – Vice President Marketing & Products