Three things that could happen when you attend a GuideShare Europe (GSE) event

The first thing that could happen attending a GSE event is that you are the one to ensure that all the other attendees will have a lot of fun – if they “treat” you as they did with us:

Marcus Kraft, the Product Manager for SLES for System z, and myself, have been “arrested” during the medieval knight’s banquet in the old rock vault beneath the city of Nuremberg.

After we finally were “rescued”, we were trying to find out why the heck they picked us. Meanwhile I am convinced it was because the organizers took to heart our logo tag line: “We Adapt. You succeed.” They knew we would be as flexible as our operating system, to make sure the social evening event will be a success. But serious – we had a lot of fun, too!

The second thing that normally happens if you are exhibiting at GSE is that your give-aways are gone after the second day (… lucky you are if the event takes place in your headquarters hometown!). Seems everyone loves our green Chameleon named Geeko!

Geeko drove a lot of traffic to our booth, and we had really good conversations. For me, the most important reason to attend events is to have a direct dialog with our customers and partners, to understand how our mainframe customers are using our products and solutions, and what we can do
to improve and make sure they really get what they need to be successful with their businesses. There is no better opportunity than actively
participating in events like GSE.

And the third thing that hopefully happens is that you learn a lot yourself, by attending the sessions. The mixture of technical topics and customer experiences was really perfect during the Spring conference. From Sven Schuetz (IBM Boeblingen Lab) we learned about PAV, HyperPAV and Large Volume Support for Linux, thanks to Rob van der Heji (Velocity Software), I am now a real expert in Linux on z/VM performance and in understanding disk I/O, and Dr. Holger Smolinski (also IBM Boeblingen Lab) told us about new functionality and capabilities of z/VM and Linux for System z.

My personal highlights however were the talks that included customer scenarios:

• Claudia Prawirakusumah (IBM Boeblingen Lab) shared her experience with customers that implemented the Solution Edition for Cloud Computing for Linux on System z , and she explained the different levels of adoption – from private to public cloud.
• Ralph Heimburger (Dataport – SLES for System z customer) did detail why his organization chose Linux on System z as their strategic platform, and he let us know about the current status of their project.
• And my favorite: Randolf Sigmund (BG-Phoenics – SLES for System z customer ) took us along his emotional “journey” he went through during the implementation of their hybrid IBM zEnterprise System. The take-away from his enthralling, enthusiast and entertaining talk in a nutshell: Implementing the zEnterprise System is still a revolutionary approach, as it involves different departments that formerly had no or just very few contacts. Thus, to make your project successful, you need to be sensitive, and you need to convince the people behind the project – in all different departments – that it is a change for the better for the entire company.

These are only three things that can happen when you attend a GSE event. I am sure you will find more – just try it out yourself next time. The GSE
Autumn conference takes place Oct 22-24, 2012 in Mainz/Germany.