Now that Impact is out of the way, we are getting to the next round of the Hursley Comes To You and the Connectivity and SOA Summits. This time covering Europe (or countries that IBM seems to think are part of Europe).
The first one is at Stockholm next week, on June 11. Then it moves to June 20 in Manchester, July 1 and 2 in Tel Aviv, July 8 in Paris, July 9 and 10 in Madrid.
And this blog is apparently partly responsible for one of them: the Paris event was requested by someone who had read my writing about the US events. And we were able to oblige.
The agendas are slightly different at each event, depending on the expected audience.
But I know that at Paris we are planning to include some deep-dive technical subjects. It will be done in English – sorry, but my French isn’t up to discussing performance tuning. Hopefully that will be OK. I’m looking forward to doing that one as I’ve not been to Paris for many years. Going to see if I can get the train over.
If you don’t have user group meetings, get some set up! That’s how all user groups get started. Building a community can be done, as we see in other user groups around the world.
Getting the Hursley Comes To You organised then just needs the local IBM sales teams to support and request it … we do like to have some assurance of an audience so a user group is a good base to build on! Though of course getting to some countries can be more difficult than others because of travel time, any necessary visas, etc.
Europe as an entity in corporate minds has a vague and varied geography. A prior employer had Canada as part of the Europe territory. That decision made some sense when the back story was revealed – it seems the first Canadian customer was from Quebec and there was a very limited pool of people in the Atlanta headquarters who spoke French, so all of Canada became part of Europe in the minds of sales and support.
Of course once a decision like that has been made, it will never be unmade. So years later after the original customer had gone bankrupt and we had far more companies in the ‘Anglo’ provinces, our poor customers in Canada had to call France to open a support request.