The WTC event is still going on as I write this page. It’s a great alternative to the massive Impact conference that is in Las Vegas every spring. A smaller, more focussed conference, it’s ideal for European customers and IBM teams to meet up towards the end of the year and hear technical sessions about a range of WebSphere products. Though it’s not required that you are from Europe – this time I ran into two colleagues from Australia who had decided it was easier to get to Germany than Nevada.
It seemed that this year we had the same number of attendees as last year, but the venue was much smaller. Instead of spreading across an enormous conference centre, we used a hotel’s facilities with the advantage that it was much easier to meet people. And we could stay in the same location instead of having to get a train/bus.
For my talks this year at WTC, I presented on what’s new in MQ V7.1 and V7.5, and a session on MQ’s Managed File Transfer solution. I also did a talk about monitoring and auditing that was given the alternative title (which we weren’t allowed to publish) “WebSphere MQ: What the $*@# is going on?“. All sessions well-attended and I didn’t see anyone falling asleep even though two of them were right after (large) lunch.
The European technical conferences used to be notorious for afternoon snoozing, as when I started doing them 15 years ago, wine was served at lunch. One of our team knew the phrase for “leave the bottle” in almost every language. That’s been discontinued, but there is still a relaxing attitude at the meals.
I didn’t want to leave early, but I had to get back to Hursley for another event. And next week, planning starts for the content of Impact 2013.