Monday 22 September 2008

WebSphere User Group UK meeting in Edinburgh

Last Wednesday I had the pleasure of speaking at the Edinburgh WebSphere User Group meeting. It was the first time I have been to Edinburgh in 10 years and a trip was long overdue (although I would have prefered to have more than a day there).

It was the second time I have spoken at an event and I find it a little daunting. Mostly when I speak with customers it is one on one which makes it much easier to ensure that the customer gets what they need from the meeting. With a presentation to a room of 20 or more people it is much harder to know if the pitch was well received or not. In this case I think it was well received because I had two sessions and both were equally full of people.

I was supposed to be co-presenting with Simon Kapadia who is the ISSW security lead in EMEA, but he was infected by a nasty virus days before the WUG, so I had to present his content which was a significant challenge, having only seen half slides four hours before having to present them.

The big news of course was the v7 release of WebSphere Application Server which is due out this Friday (26th September). After two years it was great to be able to talk about it in the open. When talking to customers and saying you develop the app server, but essentially having to deny the existence of whatever the next version will be is very odd.

Alasdair

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