The beach town of Del Mar is a scenic escape built into the rocky seaside cliffs of San Diego, California. In the summer, it's the site of lavish vacations at resorts and seasonal homes, but it's a temperate destination for sightseeing all year round. Even in October, it's an ideal location for an outdoor gathering. With face-to-face events steadily resuming, C2C did not hesitate to seize the opportunity to invite partners and community members to connect live at this stunning locale.
At 4 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time on Tuesday, October 19, 2021, C2C hosted our first live C2C Connect event, sponsored by our partners at Quantiphi. President Josh Berman opened the event with a brief but enthusiastic welcome, and then invited Quantiphi's West Coast Regional Sales Leader Earl James Gobin to say a few words. Kyle Murley, a Customer Engineer at Google, closed out the program of speeches, and then ushered in the main item on the event program: an open reception inviting community members to share takeaways from Google Cloud Next 2021 over food and drinks.
According to Alfons Mu�oz, C2C's North American Community Manager, the guests, over 40 in total, represented a range of partners, organizations, and interested customers. "We had Googlers. We had partners. Quantiphi was a sponsor. We had customers from the community. We had companies there that were well represented, like Mitchell International." he says. He recalls a friendly debate with guests from Mitchell International over whether Angular or React works better as a front-end development platform. Multiple guests from Qualcomm, Thoughtworks, Inc., Brain Corporation, and San Diego-based Illumina also attended.
At the end of the event, the C2C team members invited the guests to drop their business cards in a glass bowl to participate in a raffle. Murley and C2C Director of Partnerships and Alliances Marcy Young did the honors of selecting the winners who received gift boxes from Google. All attendees received bags of complimentary merchandise from C2C and Quantiphi.
By all accounts, the event represented a successful return to face-to-face programming for C2C. In 2022, C2C plans to accomplish much more, and community engagement will always be a priority. "We need to hear from you," Berman announced in his address. "We're really building out the program right now, so your participation in that would be really important." We hope to see you at future face-to-face events, but in the meantime, never hesitate to drop us a line!
