Tech Bytes: Inside The Velocity Room – A New Community for IT Infrastructure Professionals (Sponsored)

Andrew (0:04)

Today on the Tech Bytes Podcast, you're invited to The Velocity Room. The Velocity Room is a community for IT professionals with a focus on AI infrastructure and security. And on today's show, we talk about this community, what kind of events it runs, and whether it might be worth your time.

My guest is Richard Piazantin. He's an advocate for The Velocity Room and an experienced technologist who currently works at Cisco. Richard, welcome to the podcast, and I provided a very brief description of The Velocity Room. Can you give us some more color?

Richard Piazantin (0:30)

Absolutely, Andrew. Thank you very much for having me on today and to Packet Pushers in general as my first opportunity to engage with this community. And it's exciting. I feel like I'm going to meet all kinds of new friends as we work more closely together with Packet Pushers.

Andrew (0:49)

Absolutely.

Richard Piazantin (0:51)

The Velocity Room, first of all, for the technologists out there and hopefully for some of the technologists that have as much gray hair as I do, they'll recognize the acronym TDR because secretly most of us are also petrol heads. So you'll remember a small British racing car that is the TDR. And the TDR was formed around an idea that is about velocity. So we've all, I'm an engineer at heart by education and by passion. And what we're all witnessing out there right now is executive organizations getting wildly excited about the possibilities of changing their businesses with AI.

And there's lots of spaces and communities and groups and podcasts, et cetera, that appeal to folks that don't necessarily have a technical understanding of what it means to deploy and implement these systems and these capabilities in real companies. So this community was formed to create an open user group where folks who are charged with making it real, practitioners, can gather. We can talk about concepts, not products. Concepts intrinsic to the challenge of deploying AI infrastructure across all levels of the stack, and essentially collaborate with one another so that lessons learned. We like to talk about tales from the trench. What worked, what's equally valuable is what didn't work, and why. So the TBR is organized around that concept.

And so, yeah, for the practitioners out there, at Packet Pushers audience, these are people who get it done. Hopefully, from some of the things that you're going to hear today, you'll think, hey, this would be a good use of my time.

Andrew (3:06)

Okay. So for practitioners, AI focused, very practical on making AI infrastructure work. How do community members gather? Is this an in-person thing? Is it online? What kind of events happen?

Richard Piazantin (3:19)

Well, I'm glad you asked.

So yes would be the answer, but I'll go through some of the primary ways that the community gathers. So first of all, it's online. So we are a non-profit organization. We have a web presence where we maintain the collaboration systems for the community, okay? So there's a rich messaging infrastructure that allows the community to have non-crawlable conversations. Really important, by the way.

Andrew (3:53)

You mean non-crawlable by search engines or AI agents? Right, exactly.

Richard Piazantin (3:57)

So it is a private environment.

Now, we do have elements of the website, obviously, that are available to everyone. So prior recordings from webcasts, profiles of our speakers. When community members want to, as an example, just say, hey, if somebody's trying to do X and needs some help, give me a call, right? So there's member profiles, all totally optional.

And so the vehicles by which we gather, we run webcasts approximately once a month. And I can explain a little bit about that content. But webcasts once a month, we're present at the major sort of AI infrastructure events. So we were at AI4, we've been in the World's Engineering Forum, we're going to be at Jitex, we're going to be at the Gartner AI Infrastructure Summit. And that's typically the group manifests as a usually a booth presence of some kind for the particular conference. But then we run small informal lunches. You can think of them as like lunch and learns. And so we'll bring in some speakers to those lunches. We'll provide a fantastic lunch for the community, and then it's an opportunity to discuss a concept, and then possible solutions and considerations at the event itself. And then we are launching our first in-person gathering. So the objective of the TBR is to create an ongoing cadence of a user community that meets periodically to have full-day engagements, where we're talking about core principles, maybe running through labs, practical implementations, etc., great keynote speakers, that kind of thing.