Dawn in Vegas

So Colin and I arrived late last night, with local time as we ate a burger being 22.30, Philly time where we had been for the Connex Workshop last week being 01.30 and UK 06.30. Stupino for Colin was 09.30.

As you can guess the jet lag is a bit of a killer ;-)

It's safe to say I'm disappointed that I woke at 04.57 local time but I did get to see dawn break and take the pictures above from my window.

Nish will be pleased too, as I'm sat here working on my actions from the workshop. I'm 'only' on the 18th floor, Colin is 34th so we'll try to get some pics of his view which should be pretty good.

Today the plan is to take it easy, finish off as much 'normal work' as possible which will allow us to focus on MMS. We should be able to get to the huge M&Ms world (Mark I'll look out for coconut M&MS for you) and I was going to show Colin the Ethels shop in the Mall.

Don't forget any questions/comments you have, please post!

Mat's Agenda Sessions

These will be the sessions I am attending at MMS:

1. Deploying Windows 7 with MDT 2010


2. Configuration Manager: State of the Union


3. Cloud Computing in the Enterprise: Enabling the foundation with the Dynamic Infrastructure Toolkit for System Center


4. Configuration Manager v.Next: Overview


5. Configuration Manager v.Next: Hierarchy Design


6. Birds of a Feather session (Similar to a Tif event in UK)


7. Online services for PC management


8. Configuration Manager x.Next Software Distribution Parts 1 and 2


9. Protecting Windows Clients with Data Protection Manager 2010 (Potential SDS Backup replacement)


10. Configuration Manager v.Next: Device Management


11. Troubleshooting Windows 7 Deployments


12. Leveraging System Center to manage your Citrix environment from desktop to data center


13. Best Practice's From Microsoft IT's use of SCCM SP2/R3


14. Centralising and managing User Data


15. Desktop Error Monitoring


16. Keeping Windows running efficiently with the Diagnostics and recovery toolset.


17. Plus 2 Keynotes - User Centric Client Management and Managing Systems from the Data Center to the Cloud

If you are interested in the key themes, you can see more here: www.mms-2010.com/public/contentoverview.aspx

There is also the vendor exhibition hall and some labs, both instructor led and self paced.

So it should be a full on information overload ;-)

Last Post for this conference

A year ago, both Gartner and TIF recommended that large corporations like ours should hold tight for 3-5 years and watch what's happening with the cloud market. They reckoned we could still deliver Messaging & Collaboration services more efficiently with an inhouse model because of the economies of scale we can leverage through our sheer user numbers. In 3-5 years, competition between the big players in the market will have driven down cloud services pricing and we'd then be in a good position to migrate.

However, looking at the stats, it looks like the time to act is now. More than ever, I think we made the right decision to take the risk and move now. The cloud is THE next big thing for messaging & collaboration and companies, big and small, are heading there as we speak. Yes it is still early days for the bigger end of the scale, but it definitely looks like those 50,000+ companies will be very close on our heels. And hey, doesn't it feel good to pioneer for once as opposed to follow the tested, well known and proven route?

Cheesy as it sounds, it's certainly a brilliant time to be part of EUT and I can't wait to get our first users into the cloud.

But for now, that's all folks :p

When the cloud takes over ...

... speaking about the time (if it ever comes) when all of IT will be provided through the cloud and how we are in the process of destroying our own jobs, and how can we therefore convince our people that this is the way to go, there was a quote I thought you might appreciate in the current climate.

"It is difficult to make a man understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it." ;-)

The Chocolate Cloud

James then took us through his experience with a recent "incident" involving one of our promotion websites collapsing under the weight of unexpected usage peaks. I'm sure you'll know what I'm referring to, so I won't go into the details : )

This presentation won the award for Most Post-Pres Questions for the day hands-down, there were in fact so much interest & so many questions that James also hijacked the next open Q&A session, leaving me no chance at all to boo him, pfff :D

Jokes apart however, what was really appealing and unique about James's presentation during the day was that it was a real-world use case scenario where James's team had dealt with a true business crisis by using cloud services and in doing so had generated some real value to the business. I think the audience reacted very positively to the process, the story, the learnings. So go James for audience reaction, should really have brought those pom-poms ! ; )

"Big Bangs ...

... work for creating universes, they don't necessarily work for migrating to the cloud." :D

Ask the Experts session

In this session, we talked about a panoply of topics surrounding cloud computing. My interpretation of the discussion(s) below.

• Space to watch : Cloud ERP services. After years of madness surrounding ERP's, there seems to be a lull in the industry at the moment and indeed, we are seeing this phenomenon too. Most enterprises, just like us, are wrapping up their ERP implementation and are now in a stable state. Going back to the Keynote, it looks like ERP may be starting to become a commodity. Do any of our ERP processes add direct competitive advantage to our business? Ie, do they allow us to differentiate ourselves as an enterprise from any of our competitors? And if not, do we need to keep ERP processes inhouse? This lull might be THE opportunity for "standard", and therefore more efficient, Cloud ERP services to emerge.

• On the other hand, there are few systems that map out our business processes as closely as ERPs do. And some of our business processes are indeed directly linked to what makes our business different from other businesses ie that add real competitive advantage ... and it is for this very reason that we've customised SAP and its dependent systems so much ... would we really want to re-engineer our business processes to reflect a standard set of ERP processes for the sake of efficiency ? It comes down again to the fine balance between efficiency and quality, cost savings and functionality.
  

• There are organisations like IBM which have IT as their core business. There are organisations like ourselves which don't have IT as their core business. It is interesting to see the variation in the perceptions these 2 types of companies have of social software for the enterprise and its potential to enhance productivity. Enterprises with IT at the core of their business seem to be very eager to try anything and everything social networking, to the point that to us, they might seem like they're crossing that fine line between blue-sky-thinking and naivity. Just different worlds I guess :-)
  

• When enterprises roll out social software eg. blogs or wikis or Facebook-type social software, we tend to mix up expectations we have of individuals vs. expectations we have of roles in the enterprise. In other words, as an enterprise, there is a distinction between wanting to empower the individual to share information/opinions versus wanting to empower a role to share information/opinions. The implications are clearly also different. Empowering a role is ultimately a way of enforcing organisation control. Conversely, empowering the individual may in some cases weaken organisational control, especially where there are value clashes between the individual and the organisation. Are we, as a company, ready to promote individual empowerment? If not, we need to be very clear that we are empowering the roles in the organisation so associates understand what is acceptable and what is not.
  

• Federation between the clouds will be driven by business requirements. We are already seeing some forms of federation between IM clouds, but this trend will depend hugely on what cloud customers demand.

This was the last session before our very own "Chocolate" Presenter took the stage by storm ;-)