MMS 2004 Japan kicked off today at 10:30 am in the Le Meridian Grand Pacific here in Odaiba, Tokyo. Over 700 customers and partners attended this one day event that included a keynote by Bob Muglia, Senior Vice President for Windows Server and Management, 12 breakout sessions, and hands on labs. For those of you who are used to the week long MMS in the US, count your blessings!
Here's some of the crew getting ready at the registration booth:
There's also a partner pavillion featuring Fujitsu, NEC, Hitachi, Dell, and a few other notable partners. Their booths looked very impressive, and in the words of one of our partners, "I'm so tired from talking...".
Interestingly, the hands on labs were all set up on laptops. I've never seen this set up before, and given some of the processor and memory requirements for our MOM labs, I was surprised that the labs were pretty much full the whole day. We had labs for MOM, SMS, Virtual Server, and ISA.
Here's BobMu giving the keynote. It was translated in real time in Japanese and notice all the slides are in Japanese as well.
Over 700 attendees watching the keynote:
I had to include a picture that shows both MOM and SMS... :)
You can't see it clearly, but this is the MOM 2005 Mobile Console created by our Japanese R&D folks specifically for the Japan market. However, they did such a good job, and included an English version, we're going to look into releasing this as an unsupported tool for the rest of the world. It just uses a web interface and uses username and password authentication to view alerts. VERY COOL!!!
The Japanese operations management market is interesting in that it is dominated by management frameworks from Hitachi, Fujitsu, NEC, IBM, and HP. We demonstrated the ability for MOM 2005 to foward alerts and information to Fujitsu Systemwalker, Hitachi JP1, and NEC Websim through the MOM Connector Framework, and we demonstrated the IBM Director Management Pack. This was the first time I've seen many of these products, and it was extremely eye opening for me. Here you see Systemwalker connecting to MOM.
Naturally I have to include a few screenshots of SMS in Japanese.
During the press conference that followed, we had a number of partners announce their support for MOM 2005, and hopefully we'll have some press in Japan about our management strategy and continue to build the momentum.
I then met with two major customers on SMS who although is successfully using it for updating, wanted to provide some feedback, learn about the management roadmap, and to clarify some technical issues. Unfortunately the feedback they wanted to provide mostly had to do with their lack of knowledge on the capabilities of SMS, so it ended up being more of a "let me show you how to do this" rather than a "how can we improve this" conversation. 3 things really struck me from these meetings:
1) Localization continues to be a problem, especially for documentation. I always hear feedback from the field on our lack of documentation, or that we don't have enough on the right topics, but our of the numerous documents we have out there for SMS and MOM, only about 10% tops gets localized in Japanese. One customer wanted us to provide better guidance on the patch process, which we have with the Patch management solution accelerator for SMS - but it's not localized in Japanese, so it's useless to this customer. This must be the most frustrating experience for the customer. I'm going to have to look into this with the solution accelerator team when I get back.
2) What is the impact of telling the world that we release updates on the 2nd Tuesday of every month? Well it wouldn't be bad if Tuesday was the same every where in the world, but unfortunately Tuesday PST is Wednesday in Japan. Sadly, we currently tell our customers in Japan to expect updates on the 2nd Wednesday of every month. Well what happens if there is a Wednesday before a Tuesday in a particular month? Think about it. It took me a little while to get it, but basically we set the wrong expectation with our Japanese customers. It's interesting to think that although we do so much business overseas, we still don't think of issues like this until we really hear it from customers. We're going to be changing the Japanese website to clarify this.
3) Although not many people know about MOM 2005, once we introduce it in a conversation, there definitely is huge interest. In both my meetings today, as we discussed the roadmap and System Center 2005, and as part of that MOM 2005, the customers were very interested in learning more and evaluating the product. This has got to be the most exciting part of meeting customers. Seeing the glimmer in their eye when you show them the interface and you talk about how compared to other products or their current management tool, MOM really provides the best management for Windows. In the words of my Japanese counterpart (which was probably mangled in translation) "The only person you can be sure can make rice cakes, are rice cake experts. Don't ask the other people to make rice cakes because they don't know how." Yes I will not be using this quote any where else.
Heading to Korea in 7 hours. We're holding a mini-MMS there with Kirill Tatarinov doing the keynote and press conference. Time to put on the slide monkey suit...