Nine Months later and another conference gathering. With only a one day conference it was a challenge to fit so much content into so little time and Roy Hann did a tremendous job of scheduling the five streams.
The event was again sponsored by Ingres and attendance cost was free (as in beer). The straw poll showed that almost a third of attendees had never attended an Ingres User meeting before was very encouraging.
Plenary speakers were Fred Gallagher (VP of Business Development), Brian Mort (Sales Manager NEMEA), Donald MacCormick (Chief Transformation Officer, Business Objects), Emma McGrattan (SVP of Engineering), Michael Sale (Director of Product Management) and Roger Burkhardt (President and COO).
The primary message from the main plenary presentations was project Icebreaker would underpin application and infrastructure software stacks. Applications and infrastructure coming from customers and partners. The Open Source model allows for rapid collaboration of software projects between companies; something that I can attest to having worked on some of those projects.
Donald MacCormick from Business Objects expounded the benefits of exposing ‘customer keyed’ data back to them as information and provided case studies and examples of immediate ROI. On the subject of the unexpected uses of business intelligence he cited the Juneau Bear Report maybe a coincidence but Ingres is used in tracking salmon (probably until it’s in the bear 
)
Emma McGrattan rattled off some of the projects that were being considered in the 2 year road map and managed to squeeze the highlights into 20 minutes. It was so fast some of the audience didn’t manage to write them down. Emma realized people couldn’t keep up and promised to post something to the Web site, keep an eye on her blog she’ll probably have something on there. A related question from the ‘Executive Q & A’ was ‘What is the process for the user community participating in the prioritizing’? The answer download the source make and changes and contribute them back to us, alternatively members of the VIP programme are included in the process so either becoming a member of the programme of lobbying a member could be a route for affecting priorities.
At these events I try to meet and speak with as many people as possible but some of my time was preoccupied with preparing and showing the early adopter version of the BI and reporting appliance using JasperSoft’s JasperServer Pro, once that had completed normal service was resumed. The post conference networking event was a great way to unwind and catch up with many of you after the formal proceedings had ended.
Frequent questions were “Why wasn’t the PS3 version of Ingres on show?” or “Wouldn’t it have been great to start the conference playing a PS3 game on the big screen?” It was very well received at CA World 2007 but show and conference organisers dislike it because of the cost of the high definition display equipment and sound equipment; add to that they’ve not bought one for European use that would answer those questions. It seems that news of Ingres running on a Sony Playstation 3 is spreading and has you both intrigued and bewildered. I’d like to set the record straight. The Playstation 3 runs on PowerPC hardware and now we have a version of Ingres that could potentially run on older Mac servers or high end IBM servers. No, there was no commercial reqirement for it and no, I don’t expect there to be. This was a fun project and did not consume many resources and I’d like to thank Jeremy Hankinson for doing the port. At least it’s got you thinking and talking about Ingres. Now we’ve only got to convince the IT department to allow network gaming
The Spring in the title implies there may be an Autumn conference. I don’t think Ingres will sponsor more than one event for free attendance costs but there’s nothing stopping anyone from sponsoring an event; I’ll try and get a PS3 to show if it happens 
.
Post a Comment