Javapolis was great
Hi all,
It's been a long time since my last post. I've been pretty busy those days and, on top of that, I decided to spend some time off with my family. That does not happen that often, so I try to make that a quality time.
Anyway, Javapolis was a real success. It's been a great conference and I must admit that the contacts we had there were really ... interesting! They were really wondering what Microsoft was doing at "their" event...
During 3 days, we had the opportunity to talk to hundreds of developers and CxOs who really were eager to see why Microsoft was there in a Java world. Yes, actually, we started with getting questions such as "Are you crazy, what are you guys doing here?". Hour after hour, questions became more like: "What can the reporting services do to help me better understand my data?", "How can I make use of my java applications from .NET?", "How can I reuse my Java knowledge on the Microsoft Platform?" ... as you can see, plenty of really good questions and a very high interest.
I had been very happy to hear that Sun Microsystems (through Tim Bray) officially recognized the use and support of multiple programming languages on their platform. They actually started the whole conference with a presentation with a title "When NOT to use Java".
Regarding my presentation, I had about 200-300 attendees. I got a lot of feedback and most of it was really positive, showing that neutrality pays off when it comes to integrating with other technologies. They actually liked facts very much. They have seen that integration is a fact, not just a marketing story.
After a little "show hands" survey, I found out that 1/3 of the audience already had touched our development platform but only say 5% of them had tried the integration exercise (with more or less success BTW). There definately is work to do there. The market offering is quite good though).
Last but not least, I had the opportunity to meet ex-colleagues; so people I had the chance to work with while working in other companies. Some of them are now working at BEA, Sun Microsystems, Cache Intersystems and Oracle. This ICT world is so small ... I was pretty happy to see them again (among which Rudi Vissers, Dirk Sommerijns, Johan Kenens ...)
But, as the marketing capaign of Javapolis said ... "Only the best got in! ;-)
I hope I'll have the opportunity to talk to all those people again. This was really great.
Thank you guys ...
