Wisdom UK 2019: A recap on our latest ITAM event

Last month (June), we held Wisdom UK 2019 – the first conference under our new name “Wisdom” and, word to the wise, it was fantastic.

I said in the recap of our recent USA conference that the bar had been set high – and this conference went right over it! The Brits can’t take all the credit though – it was quite an international affair with delegates and sponsors from Ireland, Germany, Norway, and Portugal!

The Conference

We had a mix of returning and first-time attendees, which is always great to see and makes for a well-balanced conference. As always, we had some fantastic speakers covering topics including:

• Audit Defence
• Quest licensing
• Cloud costs & FinOps
• SaaS Management
• Cloud licensing compliance
• How to build an ITAM team
• Open Source and developers
• Working with stakeholders
• IBM licensing

Thank you and well done to all our session speakers, you did a fantastic job and we’ve had great feedback for you all!

End User Success Stories

This was a new addition for this conference, with 15-minute sessions for SAM practitioners to talk about a specific successful project they’ve run during their career. Not only is it a great way to share tips and inspire others, it is also a fantastic way to take your first step into public speaking. Having spoken to some of our speakers afterwards, I think it’s fair to say it has helped increase their public speaking confidence and, as one of them put it:

“from an experience of 15 minutes at Wisdom, the little acorn has grown”!

We’d love to increase the number of success story session for next year so, if you’d like to take this slightly nerve-racking but ultimately enjoyable and fulfilling next step on your public speaking journey, get in touch!

Women in ITAM

We held our first Women in ITAM session, hosted by Sarah Lewis. It was a fantastic session – loads of quality questions and so much fantastic discussion that 1 hour was much too short! We looked at the representation of women as attendees across our previous conferences (it’s moving in the right direction), heard some great advice from delegates around what women can do within their organisations, and also got a book recommendation from Sarah Lewis and Rachel Ryan – “Lean In” by Sheryl Sandberg.

We look forward to running these at our future conferences – the next one will be in Melbourne this November.

Feedback

It’s always wonderful to receive positive feedback from delegates and Wisdom UK 2019 had plenty:

• “It was fantastic!”
• “Very useful event”
• “Thank you for all the insight”
• “Feel like I have learnt a lot and [I] really enjoyed the day.”
• “Love that you had a breakout session for empowering women.”
• “Thank you for running this every year. The one event that I will even cancel holiday for :)”
• “Awesome event”
• “One of the best conferences I’ve ever been to!”

Which is all brilliant to hear!

Training

Our training day this time included courses on: Microsoft from yours truly, IBM from Katerina Motlova & Eric Chiu of Fisher ITS, and VMware from Barry Pilling of Cortex Consulting. A great day was had by all, and we had some excellent feedback too:

• “The session was great and provided a great level of knowledge”
• “Really enjoyed my time, great!”
• “Excellent session”
• “I found it useful and have gained some valuable knowledge”

Your feedback is hugely important to us and we use as much of it as possible to keep improving each conference.

Thank You for Wisdom UK 2019

Thank you to everyone involved – attendees, speakers, sponsors, the ITAM Review team, and everyone else – your involvement, willingness to share, energy, questions, knowledge, and general awesomeness all helped to make such a successful conference!

To everyone who came along – we look forward to seeing you again next year, and if you couldn’t make it this time – be sure to be there in 2020!