Worldwide Partner Conference 2010

The first WPC I attended was in 2007 in Denver, this was my first partner conference and I was totally blown away as I had never seen such a big event before.   This year’s WPC was the biggest we have had, 11,000 + attendees (including 110 Australian Partners) and Microsoft Partners took over downtown Washington DC. 

The keynote sessions this year where great so much to remember and take in. The highlight of the keynotes for me was seeing Bill Clinton present on the Wednesday.   It was also great to see our two award winners this year up on stage Eclipse and Zap.

So many breakout sessions on everything from How to Market and Sell to Cloud Computing, Windows 7, Windows Mobile 7, Microsoft Partner Network and the list goes on.  My favourite session this year was the APAC Regional Keynote I left the session inspired by the presentation Broughton Boburn gave.  Check out Digital WPC for session highlights.

I spent a couple of hours going through the Expo hall, it is great to meet partners from all over the world and see what they are selling and creating on Microsoft Technology.  Although my favourite stand was a Microsoft stand the Windows Mobile stand where I had my own personal demo of Windows Mobile 7, this has been added to the top of my wish list along with the new Xbox 360 Kinect. 

After a busy day of conferencing it is time to relax at the evening events, we kicked off with the Australian Networking Dinner on the Monday Night followed by the APAC Dinner on Tuesday, and the SMB Dinner at the Smithsonian on Wednesday.  It was great to catch up with a few regular WPC attendees from Fred Health, Fujitsu, Ensyst, Dimension Data, Data #3, Direction IT and Calvert Technology plus a few first timers from Thomas Duryea and e-CentricInnovations.

Well what a week needless to say the flight home was spent sleeping, now I need to go and start working on next year’s WPC in LA and look forward to seeing most of you at this weeks APC.