IBM IMPACT 2009 Review
So off I went to sunny Las Vegas last week for IBM’s IMPACT 2009 conference and overall I have to say the conference was an unexpected lot of fun! Lindsay and I (she tagged along and enjoyed the rough life laying by the pool everyday) headed out to Vegas bright and early Monday morning and arrived just as things at the confernece started to pick up. The tone of the conference from the folks attending this year was different than in the past at other technical conferences for IBM or other companies I have attended. I know that a lot of times its a ton of information for most attendees to process and commit to memory so everyone gets the deer in the head lights look (or it might just be the drink specials in Vegas are too good to pass up and 8:30 presentations are a little too early!) as the sessions carry on. But this year was different. I really had an enjoyable time in my sesisons and others because of the complexity of questions being asked by folks in attendance. I felt it brought out a lot more understanding of the concepts I was presenting as well as drove others to ask questions as well to drive a lot more of the concepts from being words on a slide to something concrete in folks heads. Nothing beats a session that is interactive, challenging and ultimately helpful to those there and I feel that my sessions were that this year so like I said I had a really unexpected lot of fun in them.
Besides my sessions (2939 : IBM WebSphere® V7.0 Performance Update 2937 : IBM WebSphere® and Multicore Platforms: Performance, Scalability, Best Practices 2941 : The Top 10 IBM WebSphere® Application Server Performance Best Practices 2935 : Understanding and Tuning the Java Virtual Machine for IBM WebSphere® which saw me presenting something like 10000 times (ok it was 8 total) I spent a lot of time (breakfast, lunch, and dinner most nights) with WebSphere customers walking through scenarios and issues they were having. I found a ton of interest from folks on understanding exactly how to use the new hardware that has upped the game in performance here over the past few years from both a consolidation play as well as a flat out XTP play for specific segments of their business. Almost everyone is looking to save money from a licensing cost perspective, power perspective as well as the un thought about areas such as heating and cooling as well as floor space. This area has always been intersting to me so I am going to seed some topics on the blog here over the next few weeks out of questions I got asked at IMPACT to hopefully give some guidance to others out there to help answer what I am sure are similar quesitons. So stay tuned for those segments coming out hopefully twice a week or so. I also want to take the above presentations and break them down into a few 10 minute short snapshots in a youtube video and post them here as well so even if you weren’t able to attend IMPACT you can still get some of the benefit…or you could always just hire me. 
So what was cool about IMPACT 2009 besides $3 margaritas and KC and the Sunshine Band? I think that the buzz around the Cloud Burst appliance was excellent and really showed that a lot of folks are interested in building out corporate clouds for their dev, test, QA and possibly prod environments (lots of cool areas for performanc gains in this space but also lots of pitfalls), WebSphere eXtreme Scale also seeing healthy crowds for its sessions was great to see as well as its one hell of a solid product and can be very powerful for saving you money or building a big money app in the hands of the right development team, and lastly to circle back to my first point the customers of our product in attendance really made the conference. For all of you that stopped by to talk or attended my sessions thanks a ton and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Hopefully I’ll see you back at the Venetian for IMPACT 2010.