IBM Pulse 2008 - Review

I spent Monday-Wednesday at IBM Pulse in Orlando. It was a good show, but quite a few of the sessions were full when I arrived. It was frustrating because they didn't offer them more than once. The morning sessions were mostly pie in the sky, and not very useful to me. I got to spend a lot of time with senior people in engineering, architecture, and acquisitions/strategy. I also got to meet people I knew from online or other dealings with IBM. Overall, the show was a good use of my time, and I found it enjoyable.

Here are some of my highlights:

• ITM 6.2.1 improvements including agentless capabilities and such.
  
• New reporting framework based on BIRT which will be rolling forward.
  
• New UI which is being pushed and was on display from TBSM 4.2.
  
• Hearing about what other customers are up to (mostly bad decisions from what I've seen).
  
• Affirmation of ITNM (Precision) as a best of breed tool, with a excellent roadmap.
  

Some things which are bad and make no sense:

• Focus on manufacturing (due to MRO).
  
• Pushing the MRO platform as IT, when it's clearly not ready for prime time.
  
• Pushing TPM as datacenter automation. TPM is a worst of breed product in every way, and is years behind HP SAS and Bladelogic. The product will never catch up.
  
• Allowing people to abuse Omnibus by turning it into a monitoring tool, and not a MOM or event manager.
  
• Lack of clarity in strategy for Webtop vs TBSM (which customers seem to build BSM on Webtops).
  
• ITCAM is total junk, and is years behind competing products from HP (Mercury).

Week in review

Been working out some organizational stuff with my counterpart of the company we purchased. I've also been spending time figuring out the future toolset we will be using for server/app monitoring, event management, network monitoring and management. It will be a combination of our toolsets based on what makes sense. Automation is a huge goal for us of course.

Need to put together some documentation on what we have, and then complete a strategy in the next 4-5 weeks.

Conference Updates

I am speaking at HP Software Universe in June in Vegas. It should be interesting. I am talking about our conversion off OVIS onto HP Sitescope, HP BPM, and HP BAC. We are very happy with the new products, and most of all my monitoring customers absolutely love the visibility and clarity these new tools give them.

I am attending IBM Pluse as well in Orlando this weekend. This is my first IBM show, and I'm very interested in ITNM (which we are moving to from NNM in the next 12 months), Omnibus, Webtop, and some of the other IBM tools we use. The show doesn't seem as well put together as shows from CA, HP, or EMC. We'll see how it runs. The venue is definitely questionable… I'm not a big fan of the Disney junk J

Been a little out of it – Updates on my job

Once again I've been quite busy dealing with the integration of a large company we purchased. They have a lot of major toolset issues which need to be worked through. I feel there are a lot of architecture problems with what they are using for monitoring. Since the project is 18 months old, and not progressing as well they are still sinking money into a sinking ship. Should be interesting to see when they want to scale this back, or actually design a portfolio which is best of breed, versus trying to implement a full solution from a single large vendor. Should be a matter of time…. Then they will ask for my help and I'll be willing to assist. I don't want to be the architect when I can't make major changes to the design which has a lot of flaws.

I am interested in potentially running a transformation group, which would include global reach of automation, virtualization, etc. This would be a new area for us, and we need to get serious with products like HP OO, SAS, and NAS. Leveraging automation across the board would be a huge cost and time saver.

Other than that, not sure where I am off to.

Several close friends, and excellent co-workers have been leaving my company. My thoughts are with you in your ventures, they sound like excellent moves which will promote your learning and horizons. I hope to work with you again, and we'll be in touch on LinkedIn or Plaxo!!!

I also have had several people I work with at vendors who's software has been a great asset and learning experience who have also moved onto smaller upcoming companies. I wish them luck, and I hope to work with them in the future again.