Updates from Pulse 2011 - Day1
After reaching Las Vegas late evening on 27-Feb with further delays in hotel check-in and long walks across multiple hotel lobbies in Las Vegas, it was time to start fresh on Day-1 (28-Feb) while fighting massive jet lag - we had multiple meetings scheduled apart from a speaking session for me at the Expo Theatre.
The keynote came from Dean Kamen, entrepreneur and inventor, who outlined the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) initiative, a program to get students interested in engineering, science and technology from high school days. His sincere and genuine presentation (quite a bit like Randy Pausch's famous Last Lecture) drew a series of resouding applauses.
The track kick-offs were next, with Maximo reserving a pride-of-place opening in the Grand Garden Arena of the MGM, a far cry from its "also-there" positioning in a few years back during the first Pulse event post acquisition. As Bill Sawyer said, its a measure of Maximo's importance to IBM driven through its passionate customers that got it here. 300 submissions for white papers didn't hurt either.
Bill Cheng had a round table with Maximo program leads from three distinct set of geos/verticals/user groups - Abu Dhabi Water & Electric Authority, Amtrack and Cummins who shared their experiences around change management, user buy-in, customizations, living with ERP vs EAM question side-by-side and a host of other areas. It also helped that all three have been Maximo users for over a decade.
Later Bill Sawyer called the three awardees on stage for the Maximo innovation awards - Abu Dhabi Water & Electric Authority came up trumps again, along with GM for their pioneering innovative use of integrating PLM with EAM for Chevy Colt. The last winner was another interesting Maximo customer, the City of Corpus Christi in Texas with its game plan of being a smart city with EAM cutting across all city services from public works to water & waste water to road construction to real estate. As one of the users mentioned, "every single thing we have in our city is an asset and need to be managed, maintained and leveraged thus".
I had my speaking session at the expo theater at 2.30PM, where we had an audience of 30 folks who came in to listen to our suggestions for Maximo implementation for Energy & Utility companies. My key message was that there are multiple ways in which organization can kick off their Maximo initiatives
- start in a geo and expand further to other geos, departments or divisions
- start with work management and expand to procurement, inventory management etc or
- start with physical assets and then expand to IT assets and facilities
Regardless of the starting point, there are three aspects to keep in mind when it comes to planning the road map:
- INTEGRATION with ERP& instrumentation to extend EAM flows
- CONSOLIDATION of multiple instances and versions
- CONVERGENCE across asset classes - physical, IT, facilities and mobile
Offline at Pulse, we have two very fruitful meetings as well, one with the worldwide sales head of Tivoli where we talked about partnerships at the "front-end" and the other with a VP for business development & alliances on leveraging our solutions & accelerators on a broader stage (the "back-end" competency part). We had dinner with one of our clients where we discussed among other things the age-old question of what comes first - fit-gap or requirements gathering. We wound up the evening watching a wonderful Cirque de Soleil performance at the Wynn with another set of client folks.
Day-two would be about more meetings and our much awaited joint presentation with Arizona Public Services. More on that later.
