Dublin Tech Summit 2022 Reviewed

A review of the cross-technology event

This week there was a spring in the step of folks heading to ‘Dublin Tech Summit’ at the RDS centre on Dublin’s southside. It was a 2-day affair on the 15th and 16th of June, where face-to-face meetings, networking and tech talks were the order of the day.  

Dublin Tech Summit 2022 Reviewed

The bustle of chatter, talks kicking off and a very full conference space led me to Detectify where Frederico talked about the external security service his company provides. Continuous automation of pre-pentest testing such as port scanning is a valuable service to provide independently of any internal security resources deployed.

My journey moved around the busy event hall to Zoom where Harry Mosley, CIO and Matthew Kenny, Systems Engineer, showcased the new smart features on their product. This included PABX integrations and internal optimizations for a better user experience. The range of booths, talks and opportunities to meet folks was impressive indeed.

I chatted with some entrepreneurs who requested secrecy around their products in the pre-launch stage noting the venture capital community was well represented at the summit making it an ideal networking opportunity for both parties concerned. The legal industry was also there in the form of Sarah Wilson and her colleagues from Cleaver Fulton Rankin located in Belfast city. Sarah and her legal colleagues are specialists in data compliance and governance in the tech space.  

The second day started off in a less populist manner but did fill up to a respectable degree where one was wary of getting too close to people in certain parts of the summit. Talks by many companies including Mastercard Foundry (the new design/R&D divisional merger), were in full swing. I visited the Foundry booth and was brought through some projects by James Conway and Stephen Elder.

The use of Mastercard apps for making payments and opening up hotel doors based on existing products was an interesting product adaptation that Stephen was working on and immediately useful in my view. James was on the data side using IBM’s quantum machine to run advanced algorithms on fraud detection and mapping of fraudulent transactions across Mastercard-enabled networks identifying previously unknown cash points in the journey of the fraudulent transaction.

This investigative gap can now be swiftly resolved by quantum computing innovations such as this. I went into the Lenovo booth where Antonia brought me through the complimentary service and solutions innovation from Lenovo allowing Lenovo customers to gain value from this enhanced support solution.

My journey then led me to a talk on AI and ‘How humans can co-exist with AI’ as a panel discussion led by Laura Ellis. I was heartened by the great point made on how repeatable task elimination gives rise to new job opportunities for those willing to learn new things and take advantage of new opportunities.   

The second day’s afternoon saw me attend talks such as ‘From Startup to Scale up’ where experiences were shared by Stephen Crowley of Flipdish and Eileen O’Meara of Stripe. Both leaders commented extensively on the COVID challenges of remote working. This included catchment areas to an office for recruitment, the requirements of leadership based on knowing your people and the prioritization around managing company culture through adverse times.

I also stopped off at the ThreatLocker’s booth where Eoin McGrath brought me through their scalable agent-based service that materially enhances your fleet’s security posture at the application level with their managed security solution. My final stop of the day was with Michal Sukiennik of Airnauts. I chatted with Michal for some time about development challenges in today’s web 2.0 world and his company’s outsourcing capabilities providing an integrated service that covers the product rather than just part of the project.

This is now seen as the new best practice approach to web development of digital products in particular. Michal would make a good partner to startups looking to outsource their product development projects noting his company does not just provide software developers but provides a fuller solution to launching a successful digital product in today’s competitive digital landscape.  

As I made my way home on the bus after an interesting 2 days at Dublin Tech Summit, my overarching feeling from my time there was the rise of product-focused approaches to digital innovation. This project-to-product paradigm shift has allowed us to set aside old silo-related rivalries for the good of the company’s success story in a new agile age of digital commerce. I see a bright future ahead and look forward to being part of the continuing digital story. 

John Mulhall @johnmlhll is a writer with Irish Tech News for over 5 years and also a DevOps and Infrastructure Engineer specialising in cloud-related technologies. You can learn more about John at https://maolte.ie

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