Supply Chain Management

Attended general session where Scott Hebner, VP-IBM thanked all business partners and some of the business partner's videos were shown speaking about IBM relationship. It was pleasant surprise to see my friend Alan Cambridge from UK talking as a maximo business partner. He started his own maximo consulting business in UK.

Steve Mills, SVP IBM software and systems spoke about how smarter planet solutions are increasing demand for IT solutions but IT budgets are growing less than 0.8% per year. Organizations are spending more money in maintenance of servers than on procurement. Steve further spoke about how IBM, which has huge IT infrastructure, did lots of standardization and consolidation to reduce number of applications. It was surprising to know that IBM had 15000 applications in 1997 and reduced to 4500 today; resulting into a dramatic TCO reduction. IBM brought cloud technologies in action, sharing of resources to achieve all of these.

Then Bob Picciano - GM IBM Software Sales invited a panel of IBM clients from different industries to share their experiences on IBM products as used by them. These clients mainly spoke how Cloud Computing, Physical Infrastructure, Infrastructure virtualization and mobility is helping them in running their day to day business.
Then stage by illuminated by iLuminate which was really amazing. Watch them online at http://iluminate.com/.

Next was Jamie Thomas, VP- Tivoli Strategy and Development. She announced various new IBM products. She also mentioned that IBM believes in learning from its clients then feed client's requirements into IBM's research & development teams. I myself have seen this very closely during Maximo O&G industry solution development. She announced multiple new products- Smart Cloud Control Desk which would include ITAM, Change and Release Management, Configuration Management, Service Requests and Incident & Problem Reporting, Smart Cloud Monitoring & Provisioning, Smart Cloud Continuous delivery which is in beta release, Smart Cloud Virtual Storage, Service Management extensions for hybrid cloud. Interesting point is that all of these are being used by IBM itself for its own operations.

There were few more around End Point Manager which is built on recently acquired BigFix and IBM worklight which is also a recent acquisition.
Had to leave the session in between to attend an important client meeting.  Will catch up with my friends about new announcements on Maximo and Tririga.
Attended another session which was presented by three utilities companies on how they use Maximo functionality to address regulatory requirements.  These were mainly achieved by using workflow, escalations, email notifications etc.

Met another friend of mine from Poland at lunch table who made my day by saying that I look younger; my wife wouldn't agree though. Last I met him two years ago in same event.

Didn't find much useful sessions today, hence spent time on booth attending clients. Attended couple of universities Maximo clients, which was a new trend. Haven't seen  many university clients coming to Pulse earlier. Universities mainly use Maximo for procurement, inventory, facility management, new project management etc.
Also noticed lots of small Maximo system integrator companies are arriving in market - each having its own set of tools and accelerators. Most of these are very small - 5 to 50 employee companies and they do provide only Maximo services. Many of them had their booths in Pulse. Some of the names were new to me.

Infosys team also attended some significant executive level meetings with IBM which were quite useful.

Day ended early today at 6 PM due to Pulse Palooza which I along with few of my Infosys colleagues skipped in order to watch KA - Cirque Du Soleil Las Vegas at MGM Grand http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A0.  A grand spectacular show which cannot be described in words. Ticket price made a big hole in pocket (at-least mine) but worth watching.