Selling the Cloud Sublime - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 121

experience in the Asian market, will solve the problem. Whatever the
subject, the outcome is the same: follow our lead, buy our product, and
watch your business take off.
Despite the best efforts of the self-proclaimed cloud evangelist who
chaired Cloud Expo and introduced the keynote and general sessions,
occasional discordant notes reverberated throughout the event. At a lunch
panel discussion, big-data experts were asked to state what comes to mind
when they hear the term big data . Following the unwritten script, the
experts chirped the expected—“opportunity, challenge.” One, however,
refused to follow their lead and instead proclaimed it “a bullsh*t marketing
term.” As the saying goes, you could hear a pin drop. 5 But soon thereafter,
the evangelist MC returned to the upbeat message that might convince
the audience to buy a big-data analytics service from Hadoop or Teradata.
This event was no exception to the widespread use of props and induce-
ments to spur attendees to buy the cloud. As an academic unused to the
special effects that ill these events, I was a bit surprised to hear loud rock
music, including heavy metal, blaring in the run-up to a general session.
Also unexpected was the presence of models in short shorts, thigh-high
boots, and sparing no makeup opportunity, walking the conference loor
and chatting up delegates. The spokesmodel presence was right out of an
old-fashioned auto show except for the high-tech tool each used to scan
attendee conference badges for information useful to the company that
hired her. In addition, there were the cheesy freebies such as buttons (I
“heart” the cloud; Do IT in the cloud), yo-yos, wind-up toys, and T-shirts
(mine supports the hybrid cloud). To trade on the icons of tech work, the
exhibition hall featured bean-bag seats for plopping, as well as foosball and
air-hockey games for unwinding. Exhibitors offered more serious entice-
ments to attract shoppers, such as lottery drawings for tech equipment. One
enterprising speaker, in what was actually an interesting session on cloud
security, kept the audience in the room by rafling two state-of-the-art,
high-capacity Intel solid-state drives at the end of the session. In addition
to equipping their spokesmodels with scanners, the conference made use
of another modern conference add-on by live-streaming the entire event
to a worldwide audience of paying viewers. High-tech gear aside, one of
the most remarkable, and remarkably ironic, points in the conference arose
when a massive line snaked its way through the exhibition hall. It was by
far the longest queue of the four-day event, with a thousand or so people
waiting patiently for a very low-tech reward: free copies of a hardcover