Sunday May 13, 2007

This is a first. 5 days of JavaOne and I only attended 2.5 sessions. I spent time meeting customers, partners and doing booth duty. I've mentioned a couple of times the passion of the GlassFish team. While the sign-up sheet was split into 2-hour shifts, many worked the booth far more than that. Being new to the role of GlassFish Product Manager, I am eager to talk to folks. Here's a summary of what I saw and heard (in no particular order):

• JavaOne generated tremendous awareness of GlassFish. Great booth activity. Being next to the NetBeans booth helped :-)
  
• Many GlassFish V1 users wanting to learn of GlassFish V2 features, especially in-memory replication, as well as GlassFish V3 modules and enhanced multi-language support. Note, multi-language capability is available today through Phobos.
  
• Many already using GlassFish in production, wanting to understand support options
• Lots of interest from those with appservers already in production, wanting to move to an open source Java EE application server. Most are evaluating GlassFish, JBoss and Geronimo.
  
• GlassFish Day was well attended. When you see Jerome getting into the gory details of GlassFish V3 modules and the room remaining packed, followed by him being overwhelmed at the podium afterwards, you know your on to something. This is a good leading indicator of what is to come from the growing GlassFish community.
• Impressive sales leads
• Strong interest from ISVs in joining partner ecosystem.

Thursday May 10, 2007

Working the JavaOne GlassFish booth has been extremely rewarding. First, the message about GlassFish is getting out. The booth has been very busy. In some cases, folks are already using GlassFish and the rest want to learn more.

Walking around the floor yesterday confirmed my thoughts regarding the breadth of GlassFish adoption already happening. For example, the folks at the Joyent booth had a laptop screen with "GlassFish Hosting Here". I had no idea but me-thinks I have Ben Rockwood to thank for that :-) In addition, the TeleLogic folks were using GlassFish to demonstrate their enterprise architecture tools. The first three booths I hit yesterday were using GlassFish. Ericsson was the 3rd, but I knew that going in.

Wednesday May 09, 2007

I'm liking Twitter in a major way for letting others know what I am doing at JavaOne, and for me keeping up with others as well. I'm sure I have more than 7 friends on Twitter, but I just haven't had the time to build my twitter network.

For me, the big question is will I still use it post-J1? I think so, albeit not with the same punch output (I like to watch boxing :-) ). Only time will tell.

Sunday May 06, 2007

Instead of only blogging about JavaOne this year, I've decided to follow others (eg: here & here)  add Twitter in to the mix. Feel free to subscibe to my twitter feed (via SMS, IM or RSS feed).

Twitter augments blogging on JavaOne because:

• Attending a conference is highly transactional, from meeting people, attending sessions and seeing something new and cool on the show floor
• My cell phone battery lasts longer than my laptop battery.
• More frequent updates because I can send SMS messages while standing in line(s) for sessions.

Does this mean I will not blog on JavaOne? Nope. I'll blog while at JavaOne. But the blog posts will be less frequent and, honestly, more thought out and strategic in nature.

Time to go spend time with the family before I leave for the week.

Saturday April 21, 2007

I flew up to the Santa Clara campus Monday - Friday to meet my fellow Glassfish peers, as well as some in management and the field (sales). It was a whirlwind of a time as I spent 95% of my time in meetings, with the remaing 5% scheduling more meetings via email. These meetings were both necessary and productive, so don't get me wrong. I learned a heck of a lot in a short period of time and met a lot of new faces. Email is efficient and all, but relationships are stronger and build more quickly with some face-to-face time.

What impressed me the most during the visit was not a "can do" attitude but a "will do" attitude exuded by the folks I met. Seriously.  While everyone has their formal responsibilities, many accept informal responsibilities when things just need to get done. There is quite a bit of passion behind Glassfish at Sun, and it shows. Geez, it is infectious. It's one of the reasons I took on the role of Glassfish Product Manager. Yikes! That reminds me, time to get new business cards. "Field Geek" doesn't cut it anymore.

All metrics I see show Glassfish is moving in the right direction. Vibrant and growing community. 3 Million downloads a year.  Growing distribution channel.  It's simply hard to not take a look at Glassfish nowadays. Free for development and deployment. Improved performance.  Dynamic Clustering. Stay current with the Glassfish Update Center, just like you stay current with NetBeans via the Netbeans Update Center today. I can't leave out that Glassfish runs well in Solaris Zones (this is the Clingan Zone after all). You'll have the opportunity to hear more about Glassfish at JavaOne. If you get a chance, stop by the Glassfish booth  and say hi. I'll be spending part of my time doing booth duty.

If you would like hook up at JavaOne, drop me a note.