COVID-19 changes Big Data Tech Warsaw 2021 but makes it greater at the same time.

Happy New Year 2021! Exactly a year ago nobody could expect how bad for our health, society, and economy the year 2020 will be. COVID-19 infected all aspects of our life in 2020. We adopted new ways of working, communicating, learning, travelling, shopping, exercising, and so on. One can say that the world has changed and probably never be the same as some of the changes will stay with us forever. The same can be said about our conference - Big Data Technology Warsaw. COVID-19 suddenly forced us to think differently about our conference. In this post, I would like to summarise how the pandemic changes Big Data Technology Warsaw 2021, but this actually made it more accessible and more content-rich.

Switching to an online interactive event

The largest and most obvious change was the switch from a physical conference in Warsaw to a global online event. This brings several positive side-effects.

No travel needed for great speakers and all attendees

As the conference doesn’t require travel, it’s easier to invite awesome international speakers to give their presentations. This year we will have speakers from almost all time-zones (e.g. Atlassian from Australia, Target from Asia, H&M, eBay from Europe, Apple from America). Check the speaker lineup to see who will be giving presentations this year at Big Data Tech Warsaw. 

It’s also easier to attend the conference, and we see that attendees from various countries register for the event (see the New Year Promotion available until January 15th, 2021).

More live content, more flexibility, and more days

Since we are not limited by the physical venue and the number of conference rooms, we have more flexibility for the agenda. 

This year we increase:

1. the number of days at the conference (from 1 to 2 days)

   Please also note that, just before the conference, there will be also two days of workshops (Kubernetes, Flink & Kafka, Google Could Platform).

2. the number of plenary sessions (from 3 to 4 sessions)

3. the number of tracks (from 5 to 6 tracks)

   The new track added this year is called MLOps as we see this as a big trend in the Big Data landscape. Other tracks include e.g. Architecture & Cloud, Data Engineering, Real-Time Analytics, Data Science & Machine Learning, Data Strategy & ROI.

4. the number of presentations (from 18 to 24 presentations)

   The speakers come from companies such as Atlassian, eBay, Criteo, Bolt, Klarna, H&M, Ericsson, Target, Etsy, Peltarion, Allegro, Starburst, Nielsen, ING, Imply, and more.

Extra VoD content

As mentioned, the conference will take 2 days, but its presentations will be divided into two groups. The first group (Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, 25-26th February) will include live presentations presented at a particular time according to the strict agenda where attendees can watch one presentation at a time. 

The second group (any time but especially a day before the conference, Thursday evening, and Friday afternoon) will give attendees enough time to access the VoD section where they can choose any pre-recorded presentation to watch on-demand. In the VoD section, we aim to provide 10-15 presentations in total (2-3 per each track).

This was a natural way for us to provide more content to the audience after we got so many good submission proposals from the Call for Presentations. 

~50% reduction in the price of Big Data Technology conference tickets

While the virtual event introduces new costs positions or maintains many existing ones (e.g. CfP, promotion, software), the most significant costs are reduced or avoided (e.g. conference venue, lunch). This helped us to reduce the price of conference tickets by ~50%. As the main goal of the conference is knowledge sharing, we are happy that the virtual event makes it more affordable for everyone to attend the conference.

The highest quality and usefulness don’t change

While COVID-19 changes some logistical aspects of the conference, it doesn’t change our goal to provide high-quality, practical, and up-to-date content. Last year, we got excellent feedback from the audience and this year we aim to get similar or higher ratings.

See you soon!

This is the 7th edition of our conference and we believe this will be a lucky number for our audience and speakers. Take a look at what we have arranged for you this year by browsing the conference website. We hope to see you (virtually) on February 25-26th! Based on our data and feedback collected from the audience, you shouldn’t be disappointed by attending the event :) Last but not least, you can use the code GETINDATA102021 to get 10% discount for conference tickets! Register here.

BONUS: In the meantime watch some of the best-rated presentations

Since there is still almost 2 months before the conference starts, we have compiled the list of some well-rated and still relevant presentations given at previous editions of the conference.

• “Assisting millions of active users in real-time” - Alexey Brodovshuk, Kcell; Krzysztof Zarzycki, GetInData (slides)

• “Data Science Lessons I have learned in 5 years” - Boxun Zhang, GoEuro (slides)
• “Data Science Lessons I have learned in 5 years” - Boxun Zhang, GoEuro (slides)
• “Machine learning security” - Pawel Zawistowski, Warsaw University of Technology/Adform (slides)
• “Anomaly detection made easy” - Piotr Guzik, Allegro (slides)
• “Presto @ Zalando” - Big Data Tech Warsaw 2020 (slides)