Apparently there’s some Rational software conference in Orlando at the end of May. Of course, Lotusphere was out there at the beginning of the year too.
Pah! Forget those! 
For me, the place to be is IBM’s IMPACT SOA conference in Las Vegas – in just a couple of weeks’ time. Barring unexpected circumstances, I should be in town for the duration of the conference.
I’ve been heading to Vegas on a regular basis for the past few years, but it has always been for internal events rather than customer ones. In my role, I’ve always been excited by technology and the innovation we get up to internally – but much, much more importantly, I need to be talking to customers and partners to understand how that technology and innovation is being used in the real world. I’m very much looking forward to talking to WebSphere and other IBM customers about their experiences with our products, what they are looking for from Service Oriented Architectures, and taking those messages back into our labs.
I’m also looking forward to finally meeting a bunch of my colleagues such as the legendary “Social Media Sandy” aka Sandy Carter herself, who I’ve known for a number of years now through various networks, but have never had the opportunity to talk to face-to-face. Incidentally, Sandy has some great background info about different events and partners at IMPACT on her developerWorks blog[*]. I’ve just read her most recent book, Marketing 2.0, and I’ll try to post some comments on that soon as well.
One nice feature of the conference site is that there are a range of widgets and social media tools directly available there, as well as links to different social networks where it will be possible to pick up some of the content.
Let me know if you’ll be at IMPACT, as it would be good to connect with my blog readers.
[*] I’m worried. Sandy has got nearly as many blogs and social network profiles as me now. I need to step up!
Andy Piper
Google Profile
