HR Tech Europe 2012 proved to be one of my favourite conferences that I have attended for some time, not least because it was timed to let me go to see Ajax win a Champions League game the night before. With over 800 people at the conference from across Europe and further afield I managed to meet old friends, shake hands with old ‘virtual’ friends and probably make some new ones.

The conference kicked-off with a great keynote from Thomas Otter of Gartner, a summary of which you can view in the following video:

In some ways Thomas’s keynote summarised much of the conference. Peter Gold has summarised that elsewhere on this blog but the themes of Big Data / analytics, the Cloud, Social and Mobile ran through many of the presentations and discussions.

A few of the highlights for me included Josh Bersin on Big Data and Jason Averbook on the cloud. Given the hype about anything ‘cloud’ these days it was good to hear it translated into how it will change how business operates. Key to this was the concept of ‘perpetual beta’:

So, if you find this post whilst trying to decide whether to attend HR Tech Europe 2013 then my advice is simple: make sure you’re there.