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There and Back Again: A Horizon DataSys Tale
Posted by Samuel Smith on 07 Oct 2014

Phew! We made it!

After 10 days of traveling around Austin, TX and Orlando, FL the Horizon DataSys team is happy to be safely back in beautiful Vancouver, B.C.  That's right - the team was out and about attending two massive tech conferences which brought in some of the best of the best at both SpiceWorld 2014 and EduCause 2014.

There were some interesting people at SpiceWorld.

It was our first time attending a SpiceWorld conference, but wow, what a show. For those who may not know, SpiceWorld is an annual conference hosted by SpiceWorks, an online community of bacon-lovin', scotch-drinkin' tech pros. At the two-day show, attendees can take in various info sessions and visit the various vendor booths (such as ours) to find out more of what's out there in the tech/IT/software world. This year it brought in plenty of SpiceHeads from around the globe with years and years of technical experience. It was a pleasure showing off the power of our instant recovery software, RollBack Rx (which we affectionately call the PC time machine), and watching some of the best in the biz take a crack at breaking our PC to win an Xbox One. We had folks spend literally hours in front of the machine, downloading vicious scripts, viruses, hex editors, and partition managers just to break the machine down to its bear bones to no avail.

However! Good news for those who want to try it again - we'll be back next year. So get your axes sharpened, your most evil scripts ready to go, and tap into your inner evil genius to try and destroy our lovely machine.

But SpiceWorld wasn't the end of it for us. Right after we were done there we flew right over to Orlando to take part in EduCause, an annual tech conference centered around educational technology.

The wild weather didn't give us much time for fun (don't worry Harry Potter land, we'll meet each other soon), but despite the random assortment of rain, thunder and lightning, the show hall itself was packed to the brim with plenty of school reps, IT managers and CIO/CEO's. Once again we had our RollBack Rx machine ready to rumble and we challenged anyone to breakdown our machine for that chance to take home that sweet gaming console. We had folks from professional security software companies, IT gurus and more all make legitimate attempts, but they couldn't do it.

Orlando needs to have a chat with its engineers.

The show was fantastic with lots of great new and improved educational technologies being shown off including our own RollBack Rx. For those in schools, our freeware (and another great data protection tool) Reboot Restore Rx has also been a hit in computer labs for its simple yet effective use in keeping a single, clean state of the PC. It will do just as the name implies and restore your PC to that single predefined image on every reboot. Handy stuff for any public access machine!

After the end of EduCause the team at Horizon DataSys flew back home. We want to send a big thank you out to all those who put in so much work to get the shows organized and running, as well as all the attendees who came by our booth.

Needless to say, we'll see you again next year.


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