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Lotusphere 2011 Highs and Lows

Category
As is the norm after Lotusphere, a summary of my highs and lows for this year:

Highs
* Attendance higher than I would have predicted
* Positive reaction to the quality of leads on the showcase flow
* Of the 8 3rd Party Sametime announcements at Lotusphere, Epilio were responsible for building 2 of them.
* Meeting the 3rd Parties whose solutions were built by Epilio in person
* Presenting Andre Guirard with the much deserved Penumbra Prism award at the Saturday night Penumbra dinner, for his commitment and assistance to the IBM Lotus Community.
* Seeing some software Epilio developed being used (and working) during the OGS
* A very successful Penumbra Ice Cream Tuesdae Social- can you say alcoholic milk shake? Yum yum.
* Catching up with old and new friends
* GBS getting 500 potential clean slates to influence in the ways of Collaboration Software at the Opening General Session
* 1,300 People using LotusphereLive.com to watch, listen and read about the Opening General Session
* Having a Lotusphere where I took it very easy.
* Kevin Spacey
* Virgin MiFI, had great reception, and provided much better speeds than the hotel internet.
* Meeting potential new customers and discussing various opportunities.
* Sametime round table - Always nice to see that some of my opinions are shared with others, and not just me being crazy.
* Epilio sponsoring the UK Night which raised a fantastic $3500 for a great cause.
* Epilio sponsoring the first Great Geek Challenge night.  This was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed putting together the "Lotus History" round of questions.
* Epilio sponsoring the Cult shirts for a 3rd year I think?  Personally I don't care for them, but as everyone knows,  none of us are the same, and some people love them :)
* Discovering an Expedia rate for the Dolphin of $169 including all taxes and a rental car.
* Allistair Rennie didn't get re-orged into a new position after 12 months.
* Closing General Session with Watson, now that was a great demo.

Lows
* Opening General Session - hard to get it more wrong.  The structure was all wrong, I would say the balance was wrong, but there was no balance, If you have ever seen the Keving Costner film, the OGS was like that.  The postman was a terrible, long long movie.  Half way into the movie, Kevin Costner, still wasn't a postman.   IBM needs to realize, half their audience in the OGS have ADD, they want to see sparkling shiny objects, if they don't see that stuff soon, you've lost them.  10 minutes pitch, 10 minutes demo.  Teleprompters for people that aren't professional entertainers are the work of the devil.  They make jokes you make come across as tired and  flat, and anything sincere you want to say comes across as insincere and fake.  If a customer or IBMer is reading a teleprompter, we don't believe you, the authenticity isn't there, so it fails.  Sadly doing covering the OGS for LotusphereLive.com lead to my battery dying, so I have not yet caught the actual demo section yet.  Kind of sad, that the OGS had so much stuff that was none demo, my battery couldn't even make it through to the actual bit people are interested in.
* IBMs offer of speaking with experts.  Remember this video? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lcs99AS32Ms, well I took IBM up on their offer, and on Jan 17th I sent them an email with my contact details asking for " I would like to discuss with someone Sametime 8.5.x scaling, how many meetings can be active on what type of spec server etc. that kind of thing."  Perhaps you had to be a certain kind of customer, perhaps IGS would only do this if they thought they could up sell you on consulting hours afterwards, you know like a timeshare sales pitch.  Well IBM never replied in one way or another, so I'll just be left to guess.  A shame, as it would have been useful to get that information.
* IBMs missed opportunity with the students in the OGS.  You have them, now wow them.  Unless they were all nerdy book swats from Harvard working on their MBAs before getting any work experience, the panel stuff bored the hell out of them.  Not sure they left with the impression of "cool" that you were hoping for.  Sadly it might have been "cool" as in dead cold.
* Stupid chest cough that has come back with me from Florida. Not the best thing to get when you need to remove lots of snow from the roof.
* The stupid resort fee, $10 bucks a night for plastic tasting water and a really slow internet connection, and no opt out. Rip off.


Conclusion
Overall more highs than lows, good Lotusphere.

Comments

Gravatar Image1 - You mean your roommate was not one of your highs? Emoticon

Thank you to you and Penumbra for the dinner and ice cream events.

Thank you to you and all involved in the trivia night.

Gravatar Image2 - You mean your roommate was not one of your highs? Emoticon <br /><br />Thank you to you and Penumbra for the dinner and ice cream events.<br /><br />Thank you to you and all involved in the trivia night.

Gravatar Image3 - I wouldn't want to start a rumour Alan :)

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