Andy Simonds Blog

AIIM - Final Day

Like all shows, the last day is always slow.  Still, we had a lot of traffic in the booth in the morning.  I headed out at noon to catch my flight home, but heard that even until 3 we still had a constant flow of people in the booth and the 1:15 theater presentation was well attended. Flying through Charlotte then to Seattle so it is a long day.  I really enjoyed Philadelphia (big fan) - but not the airport.

I had planned to see a bunch of sessions and keynotes, but got too busy with partners/customers to do much of that at all.  The session I was finally able to catch was the final keynote by John Seely Brown, ex Xerox Parc guy.

It was nice to see a keynote that wasn't pushing a product.  I didn't see the Google keynote, but heard that it had a lot of self-congratulatory content throughout the talk about how amazing google was, their hiring practices, their PHd's…), etc.   John's talk was very enjoyable.  He did a good job of talking about how humans ability to find information is very strongly related to what it physically looked like and the last time they interacted with it.  Situational reference to information is as important as the information itself when it comes to finding it.  A very good thing to remember when we get so tied up in thinking about how to tag data.  I think if Windows had a natural, built in way to record any transaction that occurs with a document (viewing it, it printing, etc) back into the document as meta-data, that would go a long way to helping people find and organize data.  One part of the keynote that was a little odd was the comment that open source and the latest web technologies would be the key to making expensive, complex enterprise content systems very cheap.  But, then he went on to say the cost of ownership would still be very very high - but that would eventually be solved by virtualization. Huh? I agree that these systems will definitely get cheaper, but I think this overlooks the fundamental issue that customers want to have someone to call.  They want to pick up the phone and know that someone who built and tested the solution from the bottom up and made it all work together will support them.  In the end, I really don't think software cost is at the top of the list of big issues for most enterprise customers.  It's the cost of support, security, information protection and integration that they really spend money on.  I think customers will continue to spend a lot of money with Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and IBM specifically because they will build, test, deploy and support the software the customer is buying.  It was just one slide, and I'm sure there is deeper thinking her from John, but it kind of came across as another 'open-source will solve everything' kind of pitch.

Back to the show.

At the show, what was really surprising is the # of people that were coming back for 2nd looks - or bringing their boss, or bringing their engineering manager, etc.  I've done a lot of shows in the past and rarely do you have people coming back over and over again to see what you have.  We all left the show feeling pretty good about the whole experience.  We touched a lot of people that knew very little about XPS and our platform investments around documents - now it is definitely on their radar.  I imagine that next year at AIIM it will be a very different story.

A bunch of people really helped make this a success - Kaushik, Vicki, Gregg, Marcio and Adrian from the D2 team all helped make the show come together, managed all the customers, gave presentations and kept all the demos running.  The Windows RM team was also great in making sure our demos and presentations worked well together and overall a huge help in just getting the show off the ground.  What is more important is all the people that have worked on this product for so long (you know who you are).  Beta 2 is around the corner and everything we demo'd was live Beta 2 code.  No smoke and mirrors.  We had real servers running RMS and Sharepoint and the latest builds of Vista and Office 2007 for all the demos.

Also important are all those early-adopter partners.  Those at the show that gave demos and talked to customers about XPS.  These are the people that have believed in us, gone through the roller-coaster of the spec and builds changing underneath them all the time and came to AIIM showing how they can create cool solutions on XPS.  They are:

Xerox

Konica Minolta

Quality Logic

Scan Optics

Nuance

Informative Graphics

Also important to note that the guys from Global Graphics, Zoran and Software Imaging who have been supporting XPS for a long time were at the show, talking to customers about XPS and spreading the good word.  Thanks!

It will be really amazing to see this list the next time we are at AIIM.  A lot more will also be at Winhec next week.

Although I think Philly may be the worst airport in the country, Seattle still has the slowest baggage system ever - anywhere.   My feet hurt, my back is killing me - maybe I am too old to do booth duty anymore.

- Andy