A totally different view on Lotusphere

Lotusphere 2009 was my tenth, so you’d think I’d be used to it by now, but my view of Lotusphere this year was as a “booth babe” and speaker rather than a session attender, I didn’t get to see any of the great technical content which is hugely disapppointing as there were probably 15 or 20 sessions I would love to have gone to. Hopefully I’ll be able to catch up with the slideware and session downloads that a lot of people are offering. I also had to take the parties a little easy, so I even got 5 hours sleep one night.

In terms of the announcements we’ve already seen great coverage from the guys who were on the official blogger program. I have to say I’m not a huge fan of spreading the big news out during the week, I’d rather have all of the goodness in the OGS and then tailor what I want to find out about based upon that, but I understand the reasoning from IBM’s point of view. In fact the OGS’ generally were much slicker that previous years, even though they both overran quite significantly. And with The Blue Man Group, Dan Ackroyd and Benjamin Zander the guests were back up to excellent all round.

Gayle and Bruce had warned us that working on the show floor was harder than it looked, they weren’t lying. By Wednesday evening we were all pretty well knackered with very sore feet and legs from all the standing and demo-ing. But both Kitty and Mark really went above and beyond in the amount of effort they put in for us. I can’t tell you how much it is appreciated. Largely due to their work, the traffic to the stand, number of demos, trials and so on were far in excess of what we were expecting, it’s going to be a very busy couple of months now I suspect.

Of course, as always the best thing about the week is the people, catching up with old friends, making new ones (there were a lot of new people attending this year which is great news for everyone). Volker’s photo of the bloggers on the main stage after the closing pretty much sums it all up for me:

The dates for next year were announced, so see you in Florida from the 17th to 21st January.

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