Sunday October 23, 2005

Opportunities are what you make of them

I spent time at the Symposium ITXpo at Gartner this week.   A few days before boarding a plane to Florida, someone asked if it was really going to be worth my time.  Wouldn't it be better to stay in Menlo Park and get work done?  Good question.  I had an Ops Review coming up the next week (tomorrow, now) and it was important to have my ducks in order - plus my team has an aggressive set of goals and there is tons of work to do.

Jennifer Henderson - Analyst Relations manager extraordinaire - and I put our heads together and concluded that the trip would be worth it.  We were right.  But that's not the point.  It could have been a poor use of my time, were it not for the determination of people on Joanne Master's AR team - Jennifer included - and Laura Ramsey - and a little bit of luck thrown-in as well.  The point is that opportunities are what you make of them. 

The Gartner conference is huge, almost to a fault, which makes it either exhilirating or overwhelming or both, depending on your tolerance for chaos and noise. At times, there are as many as 15 sessions running in parallel - plus the show floor to choose from.  'Tis not for the faint of heart. 

The trip started with serendipity. I ran into Dinesh Bahal on the shuttle to SFO.  Dinesh is a senior sales director in the Education arena. We first met 8 years ago, had just reconnected the week before and it was great to spend time figuring out where our work overlaps and how we can help each other. In fact, our shuttle conversation was so absorbing that I missed my stop and had to walk through several terminals to get back to where I needed to be.  Sigh...

Face time with Laura Ramsey and Eric Boutilier was hugely valuable.  Laura and Eric manned the OpenSolaris pod and spoke with lots and lots of Solaris customers, some of whom didn't yet grok how OpenSolaris helps them.  If you're busy, as most are, it's easy to assume OpenSolaris is some developer program you don't need to worry about.  When you peel back the onion, the possibilities jump out at you - such as the fact that there will be more Solaris sysadmins familiar with the technology and available for hire in five years time.

Joanne Masters invited me to join her and her team - Jennifer, Lara, Allison - for lunch.  We sat outside in the Florida sun (and humidity!), and the conversation was an eye-opener to the world of analyst relations.  Joanne also gave me some great ideas about how to connect with our sales force.  Next, I connected with Dan Berg, CTO of Sun's Services organization and all-around intelligent guy, to plot what kind of seeds we should sow in the services sector because of the doors opened by OpenSolaris.  [Note to Dan - Please Blog!]  I attended Chris Ratcliffe's Myth Busters talk about Solaris 10, Ashesh Badani's talk on SOA, and Mark Herring's Open Source in the Enterprise talk.  Then, I met Mark Driver (an open source analyst for Gartner) and talked about OpenSolaris and CDDL with him.   The Gartner folks organized a gathering for us on Tue eve and I had the chance to meet and greet with analysts Laura McLellan, Daryl Plummer, Stan Zaffos, Roger Cox - and Tim Szumowski. (Although Tim didn't tell me he was a serious tennis player...)

Later that night - thanks to Laura's gracious invitation - Ashesh and I joined an impromptu dinner of sushi and karaoke with Laura, Eric, David Berlind and Dan Farber.  A Frank Sinatra fan made the karaoke enjoyable and we took turns taking goofy photos wearing David's glasses.  Out of respect for my dinner-mates, I didn't sing.  Hope they appreciated my restraint!

I met James Dias of Selectica - another Malcolm Gladwell fan - and we shared notes about marketing and tipping points and del.icio.us and blogging - and how to make the kernel of your idea viral so the message propagates.  On the flight back I sat next to Vinnie Gupta, Sun's Market Development Manager in the Edu arena, and learned quite a bit about how the Edu team gets their job done.  Then, as soon as I was back on the ground at SFO, serendipity kicked in again and Stephen O'Grady and I were just a few miles from each other and were both free for an hour, so we squeezed in lunch just before Steve's keynote on simplicity at the Zend/PHP conference.  I'm sure he kicked butt.  All in all, a good trip.  Thanks, everyone.

p.s.  Kim Gerton did a phenomenal job keeping our Gartner activities organized.  Many thanks!

Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris

(2005-10-23 14:37:48.0) Permalink Comments [1]