Last week HarperDB exhibited at IoTBuild in San Francisco, California.  This was our first IoT conference and we couldn’t have had more fun!  We came ready to show off HarperDB on our brand new Raspberry Pi demo cluster and to talk with leading thinkers in the IoT space, and we did just that.  

Arrival

When we first arrived we didn’t really know what to think.  Stephen and I flew in the night before the conference began and, of course, we did a little investigation around the conference.  We walked around the center to find a small exhibitor room and a couple of conference rooms setup for panel discussions. “This is it?” we thought.  But we were already there, and we’re not ones to back down, so we setup our booth and headed into San Francisco to have dinner with Ashwini, the winner of our hackathon. Tomorrow was a new day…

The Conference

Our booth was setup, our demo cluster was working beautifully, and the HarperDB team was ready to talk IoT!  Breakfast was served. Stephen, Johnny, and I manned the booth.  The first attendee walked over and started talking with us.  It was an incredibly insightful discussion, both strategically and technically.  We continued talking to attendees for the rest of the morning and very quickly realized that this wasn’t just any conference.  IoTBuild was attended exclusively by the best of the best.  We met with IoT leaders at both the executive level and the technical level. We demonstrated our cluster, data model, Tableau integration through our ODBC driver, and much more.  It was insightful for us to discuss the unlimited use cases that exist in the IoT space.  

Demonstrating HarperDB

Personally, my favorite part of the conference was watching the lightbulb go off when attendees realized what makes HarperDB so special.  It was fun to see the realization happen in real-time of how our exploded data model enables us to be a differentiator in the IoT space.  We ran the demo cluster from my laptop using Postman to connect over a local network.  We created tables during the conference with replication set on any given set of nodes.  We showed off just how easy it is to integrate with HarperDB by connecting Tableau to our demo server.  We even had an attendee download and install HarperDB on his laptop with us by his side! (It took him about 5 minutes with little intervention from us).  Let’s just say that the reception of HarperDB at IoTBuild was overwhelmingly positive. 

What’s Next?

Think that would be our only IoT conference?  Think again!  HarperDB will be attending IoT World in Santa Clara, California from May 14th through the 17th at the Santa Clara Convention Center.  We’ll be bringing all kinds of swag like our super comfortable t-shirts and HarperDB stickers as well as some demo tech.  Come visit us in booth 1146!