Updates from IMPACT 2011 - Day 0
Day 0 - Business Partners Summit - Sunday, April 10th 2011
IMPACT, as usual, kicked off smoothly. Our marketing and alliance teams had prepared well and registration and the exhibition booth set up was completed without a hitch given the considerable preparation that they had come with. Looking at the crowd, the response to the ‘Business Partner Summit’ seems to be very encouraging. Clearly, the improving economy conditions are being reflected in the turn out.
As expected the focus this year is going to the around the release of the Business Process Manager v 7 5 and the unveiling of Smarter Commerce.
Steve Cowley (VP, Industry and Solution Sales) talked about the success IBM has been having in the Smarter Commerce launch. Clearly they believe that they have a head start in this area and appear to be intent in consolidating this advantage. Another point to note - IBM expects to come out with pre-integration of various products under the Smarter Commerce umbrella. It will be very interesting to see what specific industry solutions and how extensive this pre-integration will turn out to be.
Marie Wieck (GM, Application & Integration Middleware) spoke about the launch of the Business Process Manager v 7 5. Essentially this is the merger of the Lombardi and WPS tool sets thereby bringing together the simplicity of Lombardi with the power and industry scale provided by WPS. One fundamental improvement is the creation of a single repository for both Lombardi and WPS. Also learnt in a different break-out that both Filenet and Business Modeler are going to be kept out of the Business Process Manager v 7 5 release. Obviously, on the modeling aspect the recommendation seems to be to go towards model and implement processes using Lombardi rather than just stand alone modeling using Business Modeler.
One of the key benefits from this event is the ability to socialize with a number of people from IBM and our customers and so far it has not let me down on this. I expect Day 1 to be much more hectic with a lot more sessions and even more people to meet. I hope I get the time to check out IBM Watson.
