Who’s On Phirst

3 things I learned about WebSphere customers:

Last week Jessica (our Marketing Manager) and I spent about 4 days doing booth duty at a conference, IMPACT 2008. I thought I would share 3 quick impressions that I got from the show, the people there, and what companies where showing off. Two quick caveats: first, since I was only talking to people who went to IMPACT, my impressions should probably not be fully extrapolated to a state of the general market; second, I was talking primarily to people who either stopped at the Phurnace booth or were hanging out at the same bars as me – so there may be some selection bias.

1. WebSphere is SO main-stream. It’s everywhere. No one industry dominates. Everyone is using WAS, and its add-on products. I knew that there were lots of folks using Portal, but what surprised me was the number of people I talked to who were currently using Process Server or were planning to. Personally, I thought adoption would be slower than that. But lots of companies seem to be embracing it.
2. There were tons of consultants. Everyone from GBS, to Perficient, Accenture, CSC, CapGemini, etc., etc., etc. Sure, they were prospecting for customers just like I was, and I get that, but doesn’t that say something about the industry that the thing we are there to see/learn/discuss is so complex that about a third of the people I talked to where consultants?
3. There were some small companies doing some pretty cool things (and not just Phurnace). For example, the people right next to us was Clear App (a competitor of CA’s Wiley) who had some interesting stuff on performance monitoring of Portal apps. And I met Michael Dag, a solo owner of a company called MQSystems. He has an interesting tool for the modeling of MQ configs and object relationships. Start-ups and early stage companies are alive and well. And they are driven by some interesting innovation.

So that’s my quick three: WebSphere -- it’s everywhere, lots of people want you to pay them to help you with it, and there is some real innovation happening in start-up land. Oh, and next year I am not staying at the Tropicana Hotel. But that’s a whole different topic.