WPC Day 3
During day 3 of the WPC, it was fun to see some of the "new friends" people were making, and some of the "good bye's" that happened all day long. Proof that the networking portion of the WPC was a success. The morning keynote was interesting, I chose to watch the keynote from my hotel room via digitalwpc. Yes, we were out late the night before so it was nice to move a little slower and not miss any of the keynotes.
I enjoyed Allison Watson's messages every morning, so it was nice to see her wrap this up. Kevin Turner was very focused on the partner community and talked about our increase in our PAM (Partner Account Manager) community to provide a higher touch to our partners. I also liked that Kevin encouraged the partners to reach out to him if there are any problems with our growth or capacity. It was reassuring to see Allison and Kevin focused on helping our partners continue to grow and succeed.
Dr. Muhammad Yunus presented during the keynote slot as well. I've heard his presentation before, so I got distracted during his discussion and started working on my schedule for the rest of the day. Dr. Yunus is a great presenter and if you haven't heard about what he's done, it is well worth your time to listen to his keynote and see how it has impacted us all.
Mobile (Windows Mobile Phones) is continuing to grow. I spent a lot of time on the Expo floor looking at some of the solutions built on the Windows Mobile platform. People have been so creative with the type of solutions presented. One company built InfoPath forms for the WM 6 devices. It's great! While they suggest that you define a separate view of the form for the mobile device, to accommodate its' form factor, by leveraging a separate view of a form, the WM device is then able to leverage the same business logic in the original InfoPath form. To me, this is impressive. Maybe it's not a biggie to you, but I do like that we continue to separate the business logic from the UI without creating a lot of additional work for the the extension of our solutions to additional form factors.
The big buzz this week has been Software + Services. Of course, some people have been concerned that they could "lose revenue" if they move to an S+S scenario, but I see a lot more value add in the S+S model AND you spend less time in the car. We'll talk more about S+S in the future, this is a great opportunity to take your level of service to the "next level" and offload some of the mundane tasks to the service provider.
I also attended a Virtualization and Security discussion. This one was interesting! Please keep in mind that just because you have a server within a virtual machine, as opposed to residing on traditional hardware, the machine still needs to be secured just like a normal machine on normal hardware. A virtual solution now not only includes the virtual machines, but you must also secure the host server as well. We need to ensure that the host server is secure. If the host server is compromised, while each virtual machine can still be kept secure, an attacker, at a minimum, could take your host machine offline, thus disabling all of the workload availability for all of the virtual machines on that host. Our development group spent a lot of time working on these additional threat scenarios and I appreciated the openness of the information presented. It looks like they've really done a good job of addressing these new types of threats.
This was my first WPC and I enjoyed the content, and meeting a lot of new partners. I'm looking forward to our WPC next year, I'll be better prepared and will spend more time meeting our partners from all over the globe.
Until next time!
Rob