Icon UK 2015

A very hectic Icon UK has just passed in a blur, leaving a hangover and a sense of satisfaction.

Tim Clark put on great display aided by a number of brave souls, with great content and facilities (ignoring the on site WIFI) and amazing after event social times.

As always the IBM community put on its best and came out with a wide variety of vendors and attendees (most of them long time friends that I get to see far too infrequently) all very positive and with fresh new ideas.

But for me the highlight of the conference was the arrival of IBM Marketing’s Penny Hill and the IBM champion manager Amanda Bauman , marketings absence has been a long bug bear and to finally meet someone and be able to offer help to and get help in return was wonderful ( so Penny or Amanda if you are reading this, I was serious about just yelling if there was anything I could do to help and I suspect that applies for a lot of the community.) I also must not forget the none marketing branches of IBM who also came out, took criticism and came back with excellent answers, well done all round.

LDC Via was taken far more seriously by attendees then in previous conferences (well it seemed so to me), with us having the highest turn out of all the vendor sessions, so much so that we ran out of Gin and Pimms (and no we did not tell people before the session that we would be serving drinks) and a good stream of people with serious questions and excellent use case scenarios, leaving use with a ton of leads to follow up and a bunch of new features to go Gold with.

No technical presentations for me this time though I did help with Tim and Femke’s presentation as well as present the Changing technologies with Gab Davis

[Chris Harris](https://twitter.com/chriscwharris) was taking the good pictures this time around and did a great one of the LDCVia team. The proper serious one will appear on the official [LDC Via](http://ldcvia.com/) blog for the event but in the mean time here is one of the silly ones.