I’ve still got one or two more posts on individual sessions to crank out but given there has been one or two summary posts already, from Andrew and others, I wanted to get down my overall thoughts on the few days in Lisbon. I’ll go through each day and then bring it all together.
Day 1 – Partner Conference
The first day brought a feeling of change, with new people like Fred Monjazeb, Chris McLaughlin and Jeetu Patel taking to the stage it did feel as though there was a change in the senior positions. Coupled with the announcement the previous Thursday on the departure of Mark Lewis I was looking forward to the following day’s keynote. The venue itself was great, nice to have a bit of warmth in late October and there was a lot more space in the exhibition area. I had a great chance to catch up with a lot of people in the afternoon and then evening over dinner before the night was brought to a close listening to some Fado music in the centre of Lisbon. If you ever go to Lisbon find a bar which plays this music, it is a great experience.
Day 2 – Keynotes and Architecture
Now I have already posted about both the Architecture session and the morning Keynote. Jeroen really got people to sit up and take notice in his architecture session, it was a bit of a slow build up (necessarily slow as this was a deep dive), but I just wish Jeroen had timed his presentation, he clearly needed two hours and not the allotted 45 minutes. As a result he did a second part in the late afternoon which I couldn’t get to due to other commitments, Virtual Momentum will have to do for this if it is one of the sessions on there. Enough has been said on the keynote, although I will come back to the overall message at the end. However there was definitely a buzz starting to go through the conference following some of the sessions. Personally I was also starting to get busy as the number of customers who wanted to talk with me started to increase. The Cultural Evening was good fun but the location was not great, nearly two hours on a bus wasn’t the best way to start the evening. Still, a positive day overall.
Day 3 – Presentation Day
Day 3 was when I was due to give a presentation on SharePoint and Documentum, but first I attended the Fatwire presentation to understand EMC’s direction on integrating this product. This was interesting and a colleague of mine, Jeff Quiggle, gave a good insight into how customers can look at migrating content from Documentum to Fatwire. However I did get a bit of feeling of ‘so what’ from this session, we were shown a numbver of websites which were produced using Fatwire but to be honest they could have been done in HTML. I would have loved to have seen how the content was managed, or how the customer feedback was brought back into the repository or how Social Media really could have been linked into the overall solution.
I then did my presentation with Jon Ludwig. This was a well attended session, still waiting for the exact numbers, and it was good to get up in front of people with this being my 3rd Momentum and something I had made a promise to myself back in Prague that I would do. The feedback afterwards was positive and I look forward to finding more stories to tell to customers and partners at future events. The other theme on the Wednesday was the number of customers who I spoke to, I counted nearly a dozen different customers who wanted to talk to me in detail about SharePoint and Documentum. This was great fun and a great way to help understand the challenges they face and the types of solutions they are looking for. There is no doubt that there is a real need out there to understand how to embrace SharePoint and how to get the two technologies working together, looking forward to helping people to achieve this.
Finally I attended Randy Hodge’s presentation on getting xCP to work in the Cloud. This was very interesting and I will post details on the session in the near future. I had spoken to Randy earlier in the week and it was great to hear him describe his role and the important which EMC are placing on getting xCP 2.0 right and getting their vision of Cloud right. We had a good discussion on the Use Cases I am seeing in the UK and I look forward to seeing the results.
Day 4 – The End
Whilst this was my 3rd Momentum this was the 1st time I had made it to the final day, other commitments in previous years meant I had to leave early. The last day is clearly wind down time and while there some interesting sessions I do think it must be hard if you are given one of the speaking slots on the Thursday morning. They final keynote itself was a summary of the week, perhaps it needs a bit more oomph in its message but I guess most of the attendees don’t make it to this session.
Summary
So I have to agree with Andrew that this was the best Momentum, certainly that I have been. And it could have been better still. Why?
1. There is a feel of change at the top, not just Rick replacing Mark but also some of the management team, have brought a new impetus to the organisation. I was very impressed whenever Fred Monjazeb or Jeetu Patel spoke and look forward to meeting them more in the future.
2. The keynote, this should have been so much better. This is not a criticism of Mark directly as the delivery was not the main problem in the session. It was the message. As Andrew said in his blog the EMC IIG tanker has slowly been moved in a new direction and I felt this was the first time they could talk about this new direction yet this message came from the other sessions and not the Keynote. The move to xDB and the Next Generation Information Server, the strategy around Cloud, the release of xPlore, the focus on business solutions, the reduced reliance on 3rd Party products, the rationalisation of the User Interface suite, the focus on faster and easier deployment….there was so much which could have been said and wasn’t in that one session.
3. The next few years will see a huge change in the EMC IIG products. The release of xCP 2.0 next year is the first milestone but the move to the NGIS will be massive. The name itself marks a change in the products but if EMC do succeed in making it truly an information server and can combine it with the Process Management and Governance capabilities elsewhere in the product set then it could be a game changing release.
4. SharePoint. Okay so I did present on it but it is a much discussed subject, I spent well over 12 hours discussing with customers, partners and EMC themselves the different approaches to take to harmonising their existing Documentum environments with the SharePoint world. It appears that there are more than a few organisations who are scratching their heads on how to get the technologies to complement each other.
I’ll follow up with a post on what the future may mean for people and what I hope to see at Momentum 2011 in Berlin.
