In general I think that this was the best Momentum Europe that I’ve attended. I’d probably even suggest that it was one of the best Momentum/EMC World conferences I can remember in 13 years of attending them. The energy level just seemed to be higher than I expected, people asked really great questions and seemed to be genuinely excited to hear what was going on with the technology and the strategy.
For the last few years we at IIG (or CMA or Documentum) have been taking some hits over not having a coherent strategy – or at least not being able to express it clearly. I cannot comment on those accusations because I actually want to keep my job but I will say this: for the first time in a while I was able to connect the dots from Mark Lewis’ vision to Rick Devenuti’s strategy to Whitney Tidmarsh’s delivery comments to Jeetu Patel’s industry-vision presentation. More importantly I was able to map what I am doing from the lowly depths of product development to each and every one of those presentations. This isn’t surprising, Mark set out a lofty vision 3 years ago and it has taken this long for us to turn the IIG mega-tanker to that heading and to prime the bilge pumps to start spewing out actual product…I’m thinking that the mega-tanker & bilge pump analogy might not have been a good choice considering our huge emphasis on product quality! Oh well, too late.
When I was a Documentum customer (it really was Documentum then) I used to relish the technical sessions – Craig Randall, Ed Bueche and Chase Harris’s respective sessions. It seemed that we were back to those days again this week. I did not attend Rohit Ghai and Jeroen van Rotterdam or Ed’s sessions but they were obviously back to the good old days. If you don’t believe me then trawl through the #MMTM10 tweets and you’ll see the trend.
FWIW, I did attend the xPlore session and that stuff looks very cool. Once thing that I loved is a page you can go to where it shows you the queries that took the longest time to execute. Imagine how many hours you’d spend trawling through log files to find that information… I know that I am missing almost every important point related to xPlore but that one just caught my attention!
Anyway, if you didn’t make it to Momentum you can watch the sessions on Virtual Momentum, not sure how or what that costs (forgive me marketing) but I’ll try to remember to add a link to the site if I remember. I’m on the flight home now so I am sans-internet.
Next year Momentum 2011 will be hosted in Berlin – this was a well-kept secret…at least it would have been except it was printed on the back of the conference program ;-)
Good to spend some time with you. Agree that the energy levels were very high, I got the impression that people were more interested to hearing the messages at the sessions than walking the booths which is a good sign. I think the message was a little incoherent in delivery but it was there amongst the sessions. I'll do a post this weekend once my parental duties are out of the way!
Posted by: Lee Smith | 10/29/2010 at 04:50 PM