I was lucky enough to attend Microsoft Ignite The Tour last week. This was the London stop on a series of conferences dedicated to Microsoft technology in general and the cloud in particular.

The first thing you notice is the scale of the event. With over 10 sessions on at any one time it’s clear it’s just about impossible to know it all any more, if it ever was. I did try to get a good overview of most of the different tracks though, so while I might not get any one topic in-depth I at least want to have an overview of what’s possible.

As we continue to expand we will naturally look to the cloud more and more to allow us to scale further and faster, keeping our users data local to them for compliance and performance and allowing us to integrate with technologies that require cloud-scale processing such as Artificial Intelligence.

Aside from the technology, one of the real strengths of this conference is the community aspect. A dedicated area was available for local community groups, and as ever the Power Platform user group was there in force. If you’re using Microsoft Dynamics or Microsoft Power Platform and aren’t already part of this community, do one thing today to help yourself and join it now! You won’t meet a friendlier, more helpful bunch of experts and all-round nice people anywhere.

One thing was noticeable around the conference though, and that was a lack of diversity. By which I mean an almost complete absence of diversity. As a middle-aged white man myself I wasn’t exactly helping the situation, but as an industry it’s obvious we need to do much better and I really hope there’s some change in this next year.