Just got back from spending a few
days up at the Gold Coast for Microsoft's
Australia & New Zealand Partner Conference 2003 .
Sarah Bond, our E-business Server
Product Manager and I presented a break-out yesterday on E- Business Servers:
Unveiling Microsoft's vision for the Connected Business. Sarah
did most of the hard work and I just presented
on the Portal/Bl solution that our partners OBS & SDM built
for Yallourn Energy recently. It
contains one of the coolest BI applications of BizTalk Server that I have seen
yet. The presentation seemed
to go over well, although there weren't any questions afterwards... that always makes
me worry. Considering I was
doing t-shots with a bunch of crazy people until 6am, I thought it was a good effort
to speak at all, even if it was only for 20 minutes. Surely that deserved applause?
Frank
Arrigo's blog has got great coverage of some of the cool partners who were
showcased at the event. I personally thought Frank's
presentation of our ISV strategy this year was one of the highlights. It re-affirmed
my faith that individuals at this company can make a difference. ISV is Microsoft-lingo
for "Independant Software Vendor" and it's exciting to see us putting serious
resources behind supporting local ISV'S this
year. Franks presentation is some of the best stuff I have heard coming out MS
for a while. It's not just a bunch of buzzwords - it's true "rubber meets the road"
stuff.
Another of the best things for
me on this trip (apart from doing t-shots with the obs/sdm/uniqueworld folks
last night) was meeting partners with cool solutions that I haven't seen before:
-
Dexterra have
a suite of mobility applications written on .NET which seem pretty funky.
-
G-netech are
an ISV based in Brisbane who demonstrated their "Smart
Document" solution. Smart Documents have XML or Smart Tags embedded in the document,
which call information from a database directly into the document. G-Netech has created
a Smart Document to assist with the managing and marking of exam papers.
-
So - what's your feedback on the
Partner Conference? Some comments I got from partners included:
· Would
have loved to see some customers presenting on what was important to them this year
· Too
much death by powerpoint
· Felt
like we were being sold to & would have rather spent time talking about how
to work together to help customers
· I
came for the networking and the drinking
I thought the networking in the
evenings worked very well.
One of my MS colleagues from Adelaide,
Chris Blake, showed me his new 20Gb iPod.
Its about half the size of my Nomad
Zen. Very sexy interface tools. SO I think I need to upgrade! Can't get an iPod
though - and for practical reasons. No WMA support means LESS TRACKS can fit... and
that sucks.
Listening: mc5
"kick out the jams"
Reading: The
Quantum Brain
Watching: All
About My Mother
