System iNetwork

March 30, 2008

Business at the COMMON Opening Session

For the first part of the Opening Session at COMMON in Nashville on Sunday, it was business as usual: COMMON President Randy Dufault welcomed the crowd and reminded everyone that COMMON was more than just an industry-leading conference -- it's a user group meeting, too, where COMMON leaders and members alike conduct the business that keeps COMMON running.

And in the spirit of user groups, Dufault asked the crowd for a show of hands of those who had already upgraded to V6R1, which has been available for barely a week, and the question itself drew hearty laughs and few -- if any -- could show their hands.

Still, the point Dufault was getting at was clear: when it comes time to install V6R1 or make any IT-related leap, you want the collective experience, tips, tricks, and advice that can only come from an active group of users on your side.

Three Pillars

Dufault reminded the crowd of COMMON's three pillars, Advocacy, Education, and Community, that form the basis for the COMMON mission, and used the pillars as a frame to cover COMMON's ongoing activities, such as educational offerings outside of the yearly main event.

One particularly interesting achievement is the sellout of the IT Executive Conference, which is a concurrent event that's dedicated to high-level IT decision makers. It's now in its seventh year, and for the first time, all of the available spaces -- 40 of them -- were taken. They were filled by executives from all over the world, from all sizes of companies, and they come to network with their peers and share their System i problems and solutions. Sure, these executives get a chance to go golfing or spend some quality time on a massage table in the spa, but there's a bigger point here: Developers may do the real work in the System i world, but it's the advocacy and support of decision-making executives that enable the System i to exist in companies around the world -- the cold hard truth, no doubt, but group enthusiasm, mindshare, and their signatures on IBM non-disclosure agreements are all good things for the i-loving enthusiasts who make up the COMMON rank and file attendees.

Top-Notch Speakers

COMMON, of course, continued with tradition and recognized the best speakers from the previous COMMON, trotting the experts up on stage to accept awards that were calculated by the reviews of the attendees at their sessions. The winners are filled with System i luminaries. Al Barsa, Jr., Larry Bolhuis, Jim Chambers, Kim Greene, Laura Knapp, Kevin Mort, Randall Munson, Jim Sloan, Bob Tipton, and Paul Tuohy took home gold medal awards, with Richard Dolewski, Susan Gantner, Skip Marchesani, Jon Paris, Trevor Perry, Debbie Saugen, and Larry Youngren picking up silver medal status.

Judging by audience reaction, though, more than a few attendees appreciated Best New Session - 2007 winners Larry Bolhuis and Kevin Mort, who delivered, "Pimp My i, Extreme System i Engineering".

In other award news, David "midrange.com" Gibbs took home COMMON's Distinguished Service Award, and he did it to the sound of thunderous applause.

The Quad-COMMON Guy

Mark Shearer, IBM's vice president of marketing and offerings for the IBM Business Systems group, as well as former GM of the System i prior to IBM's radical reorganization, seemed genuinely excited to be in Nashville for his fourth consecutive COMMON conference -- if not positively energized. Shearer discussed the last few years of System i-related activity in an attempt to frame the most recent year . . . and provide a basis for the next twenty years of the System i. "I've always characterized the System i evolution as a multi-year journey," he said.

Shearer covered quite a bit of ground, so I've broken out coverage of his presentation in a separate post, "Shearer Throws Down at the COMMON Opening Session."

As for the a keynote speaker, which has been absent in previous COMMON events, but returned due to member interest, IBM's Dr. Jurij R. Paraszczak, an IBM Research Director for Industry Solutions, shared some of the challenges that IBM's massive research organization is busy tackling day in and day out.

One challenge, for example, comes back to power consumption in the data center, and how it's directly related to the shrinking of microprocessors, which has been the key method behind increasing computational speed, which, to use the purely scientific term, is all about raw horsepower. If I understand what Paraszczak was illustrating, the gate in a microprocessor has gotten so small -- down to a porous layer of atoms -- that it allows energy to be consumed by the processor even when the processor is passive and isn't being fully utilized. We're reaching the physical limits of miniaturization, he said, which has led to the power consumption (and cooling problems) many companies are experiencing in their data centers.

But back to this issue of increasing processing horsepower, the answer has been to have multiple processors work in parallel in multi-core solutions, but most IT applications, for example, haven't been developed to work with multiple processors simultaneously. And while some industries are becoming increasingly hungry for solutions that can process massive amounts of complex data, the next big leap in microprocessor design hasn't yet been figured out -- but IBM is working on it.

Overall, Paraszczak's presentation was a departure from standard System i-focused fare, but the kind of broader perspective he delivered -- as Dufault noted afterward -- was an example of why COMMON attendees wanted the return of conference keynote addresses.

But anyway, for the System i-focused core of the opening session, see "Shearer Throws Down at the COMMON Opening Session."

Posted by cmaxcer at March 30, 2008 11:49 PM