I went to my first re:Invent this year. Most of my time was spent at the ShiftLeft booth but I went to a couple of sessions and talked to lots of other vendors. Here are some of my takeaways/highlights from the week.

Demos

I usually don’t get to see demos from other vendors. Being around the sponsor booths was was a great opportunity to see a lot of demos in a short period of time. It was surprising how huge the difference was between good and bad demos. The Datadog folks are really good at demos, and they have to be because they were doing like 10 demos simultaneously, repeating every 5 mins.

Data companies

Database companies are becoming data platforms. When I talked to the MongoDB folks, I was surprised by how much more they have to offer than just a database. They’re an “application data platform” now too with Realm.

I think this will continue to be a trend. Once you have an open source database, you have to have a hosted option, and from there you will probably expand to other things.

Open source database -> database as a service (DBaaS) -> data platforms

Even VoltDB has changed their messaging:

While VoltDB does have its roots as an in-memory database, since we do a lot more than just store and provide access to data, we consider ourselves to be a lot more than just a database: we consider ourselves to be a data platform.

There were also plenty of companies in the streaming/BI/ETL/ELT space, like Rockset, Matillion, Etleap, SQream, Materialize, and many more.

Investors

Lots of VC activity. The vendor hall is a great place for investors to get an idea of what’s out there and get an overview of trends. A colleague and I took a made a round through all of the vendors too. It’s good to get a view of the forest sometimes to understand the bigger picture.

Security companies

In general there weren’t that many security companies (will probably be at re:Inforce instead). Most security companies were focused on runtime security. Things that interested me were StackHawk’s dynamic application security testing (DAST) and Anjuna’s enclave technology.