DellEMC World 2017 in Las Vegas is only a mere seven days away, and I’ll be there representing vBrainstorm and the DellEMC Elect. Continuing the theme of seven, this will be my seventh time to attend this event and second since the merger. While the early Dell World events had a distinct sale/marketing/C-level orientation, there has been a much welcomed shift toward greater technical focus and this year looks to continue the trend. A look through the session catalog shows a nice collection of storage, IoT, Big Data and (pleasant surprise) networking breakouts, along with the more managerial and sales tracks.

Expecting to see the usual updates of hardware specs across the entire product spectrum, and hoping there are a couple surprises to be unveiled. The XPS15 release in 2013 and FX2 in 2014 were both launches that caused attendees to stop and take notice, will there be anything similar this year? Perhaps the acquisition of Aerohive to end payments to HPE everytime a W-Series wireless deployment is done?

On the networking front I’m particularly excited to see all the sessions on the new OS10 and -ON platforms. When OS10 was first announced it caught my interest, a modular *nix based switch OS that can also support running compute workloads allowing services to be pushed closer to the network edge. But after the flurry of press following the initial announcement, it seemingly disappeared from view. When asked about it in an analyst Q&A session at DellEMC World in Austin last October, Michael Dell mistook the question to be about Windows 10; not exactly a good sign. So I’m hoping the number of sessions can be taken as a sign of renewed focus on OS10 and the former Force10 equipment.