TechEd is coming to Atlanta in May 2011!
That’s right in just 10 months over 10,000 IT Professionals from around the world are going to descend on Atlanta for a week. I was really surprised to hear this since they were not that far away in New Orleans this year but who cares this is awesome news!
Why is Microsoft bringing TechEd to Atlanta? Well they sure didn’t check with me but my first guess would be that it has something to do with the fact that:
- The Georgia World Congress Center is accessible to 80 percent of the American population in two hours or less (via car, train or the World’s Busiest Airport).
- Or maybe that it’s easier to fly direct to Atlanta than any other place on earth.
Although instead of focusing on being open and accessible to as many people as possible Microsoft could have just been looking out for peoples wallets. The over 12,000 hotel rooms located in close proximity to the Georgia World Congress Center are probably the cheapest of any of the 10 largest cities in America. (I think only Dallas can come close.)
So how on earth can over 10,000 IT Pros fit into a single convention center here in Atlanta and it not be cramped? Pretty easily actually because:
- The Congress Center’s Building B exhibit halls are more than twice as long as Atlanta’s highest skyscraper is high (which happens to be the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere outside of New York and Chicago). From one end of these halls to the other, the earth curves 3/4 inch.
- As many as 125,000 people have attended a single event at the GWCC.
- For relevance sake: that’s approx. 50x larger than the PASS Summit
- Or… Larger than every PASS Summit and every SQL Saturday ever held, COMBINED.
- The lobby of Building C alone is large enough to hold the Titanic.
- Building C: entrance lobby is over 1,000 feet long, 80 feet wide and over 90 feet high
- Titanic: 882 feet long, 92 feet 6 inches wide, and 60 feet 6 inches from the waterline to the main deck.
- Heck there’s over 90 acres or 3.9 million square feet throughout the GWCC
The local users groups here in Atlanta are busy working on ideas to capitalize on this great opportunity and you can look forward to me blabbing all about what we’re up to sometime in the near future. 🙂
* Facts obtained from http://www.gwcc.com/about/Fun_Facts.aspx, http://www.atlanta-airport.com/Airport/ATL/ATL_FactSheet.aspx, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_America_Plaza_%28Atlanta%29
One Response
The TechEd team loves your blog (and Atlanta), and would like to highlight it on our web site. Would you follow teched_na on twitter or send me an email with your approval? We have a few more things we’d like to discuss with you, but would prefer not to do it in an open forum. 🙂
Thx, Brandy