Well, Andrew Ford and Art said most of it, really. A really first-rate
conference. This is the first I've been to since Las vegas over four
years
ago, and what a contrast.
Location: As previously mentioned Kansas City is not an easy destination
to
get to from outside the US, involving at least one change (mine via
Chicago)
and therefore a 13-hour-plus journey. Having got there, though, it's a
mighty fine place. We went into Kansas City centre on Saturday night and
it
was absolutely heaving, withn an excellent buzz and, for some reason ,
lots
of young women in prom dresses walking around drunkenly with their shoes
off
clutching each other sup****t. Rather like being in Feltham on a Saturday
night really. Except for the prom dresses.
Overland Park is suburbia personnified really, but genteel suburbia. I
went
out walking a fair bit (very un-American, I know ;-)), and there were lots
of good shops and nice, well-kept houses.
On the Sunday we did a bit of tourism and went to Knob Noster (my teenage
children managed a big snigger at this of course!) State Park about 60
miles east of Overland Park. You could see once off the freeway that some
parts of Western Missouri are quite depressed. Still, we had the best
steak
in years at an unprespossesing grill on the way back.
Hotel: I struggle to remember a better dollar-for-dollar stay in a hotel
in
the US to be honest. I wrote a review of the hotel here if anyone's
interested:
http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserReviews-g38969-d114645-r15517084-Overland_Park_Marriott-Overland_Park_Kansas.html.
Given the old maxim of "Never eat in hotels, and never sleep in
restaurants"
the conference catering was of a good level (particularly if you like
chicken!). So, Full Marks for the venue in my book.
Sessions: I thought there was a good range of sessions. With 4 concurrent
sessions for every time-slot there were occasional clashes; on the other
hand there was rarely a time-slot when there was nothing worth attending.
The topics and speakers varied in quality from the good to the excellent
as
you'd expect; I always like to hear Mark Scranton talk (from a distance
and
with earplugs of course - only joking Mark ;-)) and Mark Jamison's talk on
the very complex subject bt scanners made everything clearer than it was
before.
The tenor of the speeches was unremittingly techncial, by design I'm sure.
By "technical" I mean of interest to techies: for example Spokey Wheeler
talked about demonstraing audibility; not a technical talk in itself but
still of interest mainly to technies or technical managers. (This talk
gave several "I'd never thought of that" moments, by the way, and I'd
commend your attention to the presentation if and when it is made publicly
available). Aside from the two "Keynote" speeches by senior IBM execs
there
was not much marketing or product direction stuff. I'm sure this was by
design and intended to match the interests of the attendees, but I would
still have liked a public forum or two where the IBM execs could be
cross-examined on the commercial and promotional direction of Informix. I
think a little of this took place in the IIUG AGM.
The was an exhibition where about 20 companies had taken stands. IBM were
demonstating OpenAdmin and Optim, Sun and HP had promotional material
about
runnign IDS on their tin, there was some third-party vendors with IDS
offerings (such as Querix, 4Js and AGS), and (I think) 5 IBM US resellers.
All of this was quite interesting (perhaps not the resellers for those of
us
not in The Americas).
There seemed to be "about the right number" of people there - I believe it
sold out, but it certainly wasn't over-crowded except perhaps for the
difficulty in getting into the two keynote sessions. As you would expect
most attendees were from N America but there was a good smattering of
Europeans and S Americans there, plus some from the Far East and one noisy
Kiwi!
On each of Sunday, Monday and Tuesday night there was a reception or
entertainment, the latter two generously sponsored by Optim (which is a
fairly recent IBM acquisition) and US reseller Kazer. Many thanks to
these
guys for the food, drink and entertainment!
Finally: I can't remember what I paid to register it was so long ago, but
Stuart told me it was US$549 so he's probably right. I'm amazed that they
could do it so cheaply. Most comparable conferences are in my experience
at
least 3 times this cost. Yet there was nothing about this IIUG Conference
administration - from venue to documentation through to programme and
exhibition - that gave the slightest hint that this was not organised by
conference professionals. But in fact everyone involved in organising the
Conference is an amateur volunteer! I don't want to mention any names for
fear of missing out a key player, but those involved in organising this
should feel enormously proud of themselves. Thanks Guys!
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