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Recently I was fortunate enough to be invited to Atmosphere 2015 in Las Vegas, the event for Aruba Airheads and like minded professionals to get an in depth look at Aruba technologies as well as basic networking fundamentals. This wasn't my first time attending as I was asked to speak at Atmosphere 2014 in Milan, Italy (Slides available on Airheads Community -http://community.arubanetworks.com/t5/Airheads-EMEA-Italy-2014-June-9/Breakout-Advanced-RF-Design-amp-Troubleshooting/gpm-p/163626) so I have a familiarity with how Aruba handles their events and was really looking forward to hearing what they had to say in Vegas. I attended Atmosphere 2015 as part of the Tech Field Day delegation, a group of well known bloggers and social media users, that focus on sharing knowledge with each other. Many of us had sessions at Atmosphere 2015 focusing on topics ranging from career growth with Keith Parsons to in depth packet fundamentals with George Stefanick. This is what makes events like Atmosphere 2015 important for engineers to attend, you can get a wide breadth of topics that not only help you technically but also help you develop as an individual. Attending tech conferences is equally about the technical material and social networking. The friendships I've created by attending these conferences has helped me immensely in my career allowing me to have a vast support network to bounce ideas and issues off of.

The week started off with an interesting thought: was HP buying Aruba? Early Monday morning we found out that the answer was yes, they were. But as the keynote commenced we were assured by Dominic Orr that Aruba was still going to operate as the Aruba we know and appreciate today. Later on during the week we heard more from Keerti Melkote about Aruba's push with Bluetooth Low Energy, this has been a huge push for them since their acquisition of Meridian which has proven to be very successful for them. The concept of engaging with your wireless users in a more meaningful way has been a hot topic in many verticals such as retail and hospitality. Aruba continues to push the industry with their easy to use and deploy BLE solution as well as their Meridian SDK that allows you to quickly deploy applications. I hope that the HP acquisition will allow Aruba to continue to push and drive this part of the industry with continued R&D support that stretches the imagination of how BLE can be used, like they showed with the conference room system. This thinking outside of the box will help drive ROI for wireless deployments and allow the funding needed to happen to do a proper design.

I'm sure I'll have more mini posts up on my website BlakeKrone.com as well as a podcast episode coming soon to No Strings Attached Show (NSAShow.com) discussing many of the topics seen and heard at Atmosphere 2015. You can also check out my twitter feed @blakekrone with the hashtag #ATM15 for my keynote tweets and other moments from the event.