Dublin Tech Summit Reviewed

Dublin Tech Summit brings Digital Transformation talks to Dublin’s Southside

Dublin Tech Summit aka DTS-23, was held in Dublin’s RDS on May 31^st and June 1st of the year. I arrived just before 9 am on the 1^st day noting a very long attendee queue, that filled up the large exhibition and speaking areas. My first walk around the exhibition area noted some regulars like ThreatLocker and SAP, along with some new faces like Optum, BMW, and Porsche. 

My circular route saw me stopping off to chat with Jason Cooke from the security company Kaseya. His managed security platform covers a range of key areas including operations management, intrusion detection to incident response. I then stopped off at the Ignite talks area, where a series of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs were speaking in multiple panel discussions over the two days.

Dublin Tech Summit Reviewed

After meeting with a contact, and chatting about management strategies around company culture, I then went and met Elena from the Ukrainian IT Alliance. Our meet & greet was followed by a commitment to revisit her stand and chat with some IT Alliance members. I then dropped off at the main speaking area to hear Cian O’Maidin from Nearform, Tracy Keogh from Grow Remote, and Mark Jordan from Skillnet in a panel discussion, ‘From Remote to AI’. The challenges that AI can help with do have development potential as long as we tread carefully in its development.

My journey continued once more with a look around the exhibition area, noting stands by IBM Redhat, along with UNICEF, plus others that I have not seen in previous years.  After checking out another Ignite panel discussion on venture capital’s relationship management with startups, my journey found its way back to the IT Alliance of Ukraine stand. I got chatting with one of their members, Oleksandr Storokha from Itera. He is their country manager for Poland and Ukraine and gave insights on his forthcoming talk around their business response to the Russian invasion.

He also introduced me to Olena Berestetska, Head of International Cooperation for the IT Alliance of Ukraine. She explained her organisation’s function as an IT industry body representing its members internationally and also within Ukraine. Her organisation is solely funded by their membership, making them an independent industry body. I wished them both well under the difficult circumstances they operate in, which led me to my final stop of the day.

My final stop of the day was with Daniel Curci from MODE. They are a Canadian company, who are at Dublin Tech Summit for the first time. Their commercial communications product is designed to fuse the best of instant messaging with commercial features such as an admin panel, images and video. Their unique selling point lies in their secure design. They have end-to-end encryption along with encryption at rest to a 256-bit standard. Their ‘post-quantum’ encryption feature is based on their integration of the US PKI public handshake algorithm, which has made their end product resilient to current quantum processing power.

Day 2 of the event was bustling, but not as busy as the first day. I took the time to stop off and chat at the ThreatLocker stand with one of their engineers about zero trust, policy-based enablement on networks and how SASE is a fit under a zero trust architecture such as the ThreatLocker offering. He also updated me on their latest acquisition, which has brought configuration manager controls for resources into their product offering. I then moved on to a workshop on management systems for franchising, that brings cross-company integration into an end-to-end supply chain.

After that, I dropped into a main speaking area for the panel discussion, ‘Supercharging Digital Transformation’. Andrew Macadam, Darryl Gibney, Ross Spelman, Meghan Chayka, and Alfredo Soria discussed this highly topical area and how to move forward as a business in digital adoption and migration.

My next visit was to a talk called ‘Digital Transformation Unleashed’ where Paul Kelly, Bozhidar Batsov, Shinjini Das, Donal Spring and Marie McGinley formed a panel to discuss the role of AI in digital transformation and how it can fit into the context of your business case. It was a very topical panel discussion that covered some real strategy points around planning for digital integration and development. AI has made a real impact on the digital landscape, so knowing how to embrace it is key to any success.

There was a range of interesting talks and panel discussions coming up in the afternoon to close out Dublin Tech Summit.  I left with a feeling that we may well see Dublin Tech Summit make an epic return in 2024. It’s a space to be watched, as tech is growing with new arrivals reflecting the advance of digital transformation in the marketplace.

John Mulhall @johnmlhll | [email protected] is a writer with Irish Tech News for over 6 years and also Founder, Writer, and Engineer with Maolte Technical Solutions Limited. You can learn more about John and his new company at https://maolte.ie

See more stories by John here and more reviews here.