As a long time attendee and speaker as a customer at vendor user conferences, IBM Tivoli Pulse 2008 was a massive event. The location was hot and humid Orlando, FL., a short, yet painfully packed with tourist flight took me safely to MCO late Saturday night. I’d spent nearly six months of my life attending electronics training in the US Navy in 1990 to know that Orlando is one heck of a humid place. I still think Houston has it beat though, and I’m glad to say that Atlanta, GA where I live hasn’t been as bad as it can be in the past few years.
The conference location and hotel was the Swan and Dolphin, a typical tourist location, a bit worn out in places and over sanitized, but with pretty decent conference facilities. My trip to China in March paid off with Platinum status with the Starwood hotel chain so I was offered an upgrade to a junior suite. Nothing to write home about – but I christened it the “Unofficial BSM Suite” for the week.
I attended the Business Partner events Sunday afternoon with one of our business partners – NGea Solutions. My badge apparently wasn’t the right color so I couldn’t eat lunch with him but I was able to attend the sessions and cocktail hour. If you’re ever in need of someone to take your Netcool/Impact or Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) deployment to the next level, look up Suresh at NGea Solutions. I enjoyed discussing the finer points of the BSM space and where I saw opportunities for our business partners or other start ups to attack opportunity.
The Business Partner Accreditation program was announced by my VP Bill Kribbs. I don’t know all of the details, but have heard there’s some level of support for our AAA accredited business partners directly from folks in the ISST Lab Services organization. I’d love to get out there and help some of our business partners develop and mature their Business Service Management (BSM) Practices! If you’re AAA accredited (or want to be) in the TBSM space, reach out to me and lets get something rolling!
Monday was the kick off event, full of high tech music, drama and demos. Lots of great vision and messaging. I was VERY HAPPY to see a demo that could actually almost be 100% implemented out of the box with products in our BSM portfolio. I’m working on getting the stuff they showed off out on the TBSM Wiki so you can complete some of the things in TBSM that they demonstrated which aren’t possible OOB.
The sessions through the week were decent. Many were way too crowded and they had to turn people away. RFID tracked all of the attendees movements so they should have some valuable data on how to plan next year. My perception was that this conference was dominated heavily by clients and business partners associated with the MRO (Maximo) acqusition. Nearly every person I randomly introduced myself to was associated with Maximo. The only place to meet a heritage Tivoli or Micromuse customer was in the demo peds or in a specific session targeted to those product sets.
To that point, what needs to change next year is some way to visually identify attendees by their core product alignment. I know we want “one Tivoli” but most practitioners want to congregate, eat breakfast/lunch/dinner with someone they can talk shop with. All that it would have taken would be a simple color code on the badge or a sign at various tables where you could just plop down and talk about monitoring, asset management or better yet BSM! I would’ve been at that table every day!
We had a pretty cool concept for giving people easy access to “gurus” to talk to. There was a “Guru Galaxy” event and a “Meet the Experts” room available throughout the week. I spoke to one business partner who had issues with a TBSM deployment in Croatia. The rest of the two hours was discussing the finer points of our SLA strategy (?) with the appropriate product and market managers hoping to share a vision on where we should go in this area. Next year we should have the barriers to access even lower by setting these sessions up at breaks, meals and alongside the expo floor so folks can plop down and chat whenever they feel like it. The demo peds are generally pretty crowded so creating alcoves where people can get together with a whiteboard and dive into product x, y or z would be ideal.
As this was my first user conference as an employee of a vendor, I obviously see things from a different side now. I see how important these venues are to the business, the brand, the client relationship and the sales process. That said, I still think I’m the ultimate practitioner/user advocate and would have liked to see more participation, more attendance and more focus on the user and business partner than I saw. The sessions needed to be lengthened to get into any real details above and beyond the traditional messaging, roadmap, etc. slides. User centric presentations need to be increased in time at a minimum. Core sessions where products are converging absolutely should have been longer or scheduled multiple times. For every one IBM led session we should have had five customer or business partner sessions.
While the sales and relationship building at an event like this is important to IBM Tivoli, we need to go out of our way to make sure that EVERY attendee walks away feeling empowered, educated and excited about attending and that they’re equipped to do something better, different, cheaper, faster, of more value to the business, etc. than before. I’m not sure we did that in all cases this year. I hope we make the conference and session surveys public information to the new Tivoli Pulse community and talk about what we’re going to improve upon next year.
I had the pleasure or meeting with many of you who follow me via this blog. It was an honor and if there’s anything that I can do for you, don’t hesitate to ask. I was Twittering along throughout my time at Pulse, so check out the feeds for that. I convinced our Senior Product Manager for BSM Dan Tabor and our Market Manager for BSM Clayton Ching to create a Twitter account so I’m slowing opening the doors of change here at IBM Tivoli. I also saw a Tweet from Jim Fletcher our Distinguished Engineer in our AABSM and Green IT space! I’ve challenged them to now create a blog outside the firewall and make more information available about where we’re heading within our BSM portfolio.
I enjoyed my time at Pulse 2008 (feet finally recovered) and I think I made positive impact on those I spoke with and provided value added information to the 100+ who attended my session on TBSM Migration and Upgrade Planning. (slides and podcast audio coming soon). I hope to be invited back next year.
The presentations are available now here. I recorded the audio for as many of the BSM/TBSM related sessions that I could attend and will be making them available soon. I hope we do this for all sessions next year!
Comments on this entry are closed.