IMPACT – work, play, product announcements

I’m not going to run down all of the announcements that came out during the first day of IMPACT yesterday – you can take a look at Sandy Carter’s video summary for some of the key ones, like Smart Work, and the new WebSphere CloudBurst appliance (it’s very purple – and I want one!). There is a slew of cool new stuff being announced and coming out over the coming year.

Sitting in the keynote yesterday morning I was feeling as though several of the worlds that I live in / things I’m interested in were really coming together. It’s an exciting time. For example, we had:

• connections between Service Oriented Architecture and IBM’s Smarter Planet vision;
• more talk about green IT, which connects with my interest in energy monitoring and Home Camp;
• 3D visualisations, virtual worlds and “serious games” with the INNOV8 Business Process Management simulator;
• throughout the conference, social media at the fore, with YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and blogs all being used to connect and collaborate.

As an “SOA event” it’s easy for me to see it as all to do with IBM’s WebSphere brand of software alone, since that’s what I’ve work been working on for almost a decade now. The truth is that IMPACT spans everything that IBM does, particularly in software. We are talking collaboration and social software (Lotus); monitoring and intelligent management (Tivoli); modelling and productive development (Rational); and sophisticated data analytics (Information Management). It’s a real showcase for the broad reach and range of IBM’s software portfolio.

Highlight of the day for me was absolutely nothing to do with IBM software – it was the opportunity to hear Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester speak on the Future of the Social Web. Jeremiah clearly understands this stuff in all the many facets that have been expressed by other people I follow, like Don Tapscott – I did recommend his book already, right…? 😉 I am glad to have made the connection with @jowyang, since I’ve read and followed much of his work in the past couple of years, so it was a bit of a treat to hear him speaking. I tried not to take over the Q&A completely 🙂

Oh, and the play part? Billy Crystal was the compere for the morning session and kept us amused despite the early start – and there were plenty of opportunities to catch up with friends and Twitter connections at the networking sessions. I call that a win. Oh, and wait a second, I almost forgot – we had a tweetup yesterday, with a couple more scheduled later in the week. Looking forward to them.

I’ll try to post another IMPACT-related update later in the week. Photos are on Flickr, and there is a very active ongoing discussion in the #ibmimpact hashtag on Twitter.