Concurrency and Connections: Reflections of a Kinexions Attendee

This is a guest post from Meena Al-Azzawe, Process Integration Manager, Qorvo, who presented at Kinexions on 'Expediting Time to Value With Data Integration' alongside Kinaxis' Angela Adams.

I could hardly contain my excitement as I cleared the TSA checkpoint and marched down to my gate. This time, it was different. This time, I was slated to co-present at one of the breakout sessions on a topic I continue to hold near and dear: scalable, sustainable and extensible data integration methodologies. Anxiety set in with each passing minute: what if, just, what if, no one would find the value in what I had to share. What if the novelty of ideation was not as novel or different? What if I would simply be preaching to the choir and I would have the privilege of watching their eyes roll back to their heads? I put a lid on the growing population of butterflies that seemed to have permanently moved into my stomach. Instead, I shifted my thought to the people I looked forward to connecting with - my account rep, my customer success manager, my professional services pals, my customer support team and my enabling co-presenter. Yes. There is comfort in being around people who have consistently enabled your personal success for a handful of years. As with all connections, there is also the excitement of the connections you have yet to make - new relationships and new friendships waiting just beneath the surface of the known that hold the promise of shifting your course on to an ever more successful trajectory. I drifted off to sleep fully knowing that the real deal would simply blow my mind away. Before I knew it, the plane landed and I found myself in a taxi making my way to the resort. As I was stepping out of the taxi, the driver said “This is the land of opportunity - seize it all. Everyone else will be too distracted.” The taxi driver had hit the nail on its head. Kinexions 2015 was exactly what he said it would be: the land of opportunity. We, all of us, as in every single attendee seized it all. In an ultra-condensed timeline, we came, we saw and we conquered. What was once uncertain and vague began to take form. What was once stagnant began to gain traction. What was once inconceivable began to grow in potential. Jeff DeGraff decoded innovation into four basic colors and dared us to fail. He dared us to be disruptive, efficiently so. Not to mention, he also dared us to connect the dots. Since then, I have been busy connecting as many dots as I can while driving my Harley into the pool with a perfectly regulated chemistry in collaboration with a herd of other innovators as we each seek to reach our AHA first. See you next year!