IBM TechXChange Conference 2023

IBM TechXchange in Las Vegas Sept. 11-14, 2023, should be quite the bash. Attendance will include a few thousand IBM customers, IBM Champions, and IBMers, as well as an assortment of well-wishers, hangers-on, and the merely curious.

IBM has been re-THINK-ing its technical conference positioning. Always favorable to rubbing elbows with their base from techies to suits, the jolly Blue giant took a gut punch from COVID-19. Customers became unwilling to travel, while IBM itself instituted an internal travel ban. Roaring back from the Lost Years, TechXchange 2023 is poised to make it all up in scale, scope, and sass.

Attendees presenting themselves morning, afternoon, and evening at the MGM Grand will drink from a fire hose of about 1000 sessions (the catalog at this writing lists 913). The Seiden Group is generously sponsoring me to join over 100 IBM Champions from around the world, many of whom, like myself, will be presenting sessions.

My session is about Quantum Computing. IBM events frequently target specific segments of the audience. In past years, Quantum Computing was mostly relegated to futuristic announcements from IBM Research. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time an IBM top-tier general audience conference has featured a full and completely work-a-day Quantum Computing track.

The late Marshall MacLuhan wrote that “the Medium is the Message.” The novelty that TechXchange 2023 features a Quantum Computing track (the Medium) is itself a message as significant as any other message conveyed in the sessions of that track. Quantum Computing has not quite arrived as of today, but it has clearly crossed a threshold.

I hope to see you in Las Vegas, where several of us will be making our grain-of-sand contributions to demystifying quantum computing and rendering it as mundane as any other technology that once seemed other-worldly and now is a given of the human condition.