' just got back from two days at Spectrum...

My first impressions.

1. Well attended, lots of good energy. I've been to Spectrum's where
the exhibit floor seems dead. Not this year, there was lots of
activity, wheeling and dealing.

2. Gus announced that IDBMA is being sold to Nathen Rector. Most
people feel this was a good choice.

3. Lots of modern products - I was particulary impressed by both
Raining Data's and Fusionwares ado.net products.

Can't say much for the location. Most of us felt naked without
internet. I can stay at a Holiday Inn and get free wireless, but these
fancy places act like it's a big deal and charge by the minute.

Cheers

Douglas Tatelman

douglas (AT) pickteam (DOT) com wrote:
Great! Any idea how many conference attendees were not also vendors?
Guesstimate on percentage of women among those not vendors?

I sure would like to see an annual conference of some sort that would
include the U2 folks that I know. None of those I'm thinkig of have
ever attended Spectrum to my knowledge, while many used to attend the
Pr1me then UniData conferences. At this point that ship might have
sailed, however. The VAR conferences have picked up with annual and
regional conferences each year (and a good balance of men and women)

Congratulations to Nathan!

I'm pleased for RD that they were able to impress you. I have never
been a D3 customer, but it "feels like" they have lost a fair amount of
customer loyalty in recent years compared to some of the other vendors.

That would not have made me happy either.

Thanks for the trip report, Douglas. I hope we hear from others too.
Cheers! --dawn

There were definitely persons of the female persuasion there. I
chatted with quite a few myself.

The biggest disapointment was the Cache folks. They had a huge (IBM
size) booth, but they're new Pick product was not ready to be released.

You could tell from their literature that they intended to have it
ready for Spectrum. Of course we are all very understanding, since we
write software, too. I'm really looking forward to them making a big
splash when they are ready. I don't know much about their product, but
at least they advertise!

"dawn" wrote:

I'll see if I can get some numbers in a few days.

I don't believe anyone gathers demographic information like age,
gender, etc. A few of us did notice a decrease in the number of booth
babes but I'm sure this problem will be fixed. LOL Off-hand I'd
guess non-vendor female attendance was about 10%?


The IBM-specific sessions were VERY well attended. I'm making some
proposals to Nathan about having Spectrum serve as a hub around which
DBMS, tool, and app vendors can coordinate their own regional
conferences. This would keep costs down for vendors doing shows and
allow everyone to get a glimpse of the larger MV market offering.


Gus and Monica have driven Spectrum for a long time and have done it
well. This change should allow Spectrum to expand in new directions
and benefit all of us.

Everyone I spoke to seems to agree that this show was good in terms of
the presentations and business exchanges. It was great for me for
business and I had an opportunity to spend time with a lot of friends.

Some vendors (DBMS and tools) have repositioned and/or refocused their
efforts and/or their message because of recent changes to software
and/or management. A couple vendors wanted to present different
messages but simply weren't prepared to do so for this show. I think
it's important to judge vendor progress by their _overall_ messages,
performance, and ongoing presence in these shows, rather than with the
snapshot that we get at individual shows.

T

Tony Gravagno wrote:
I'll try to make it out there next year ;-)

Sounds promising. U2 plays in the broader IBM DB world which is
starting a new conference this year, by the way, so it would make sense
to work with the U2UG board to see what type of support they can put
behind anything. I'm headed off the board as of next week, but Clif
(who is the new Spectrum editor) will be there as Past President and
Chuck Barouch as President.

So how will the change benefit me, for example? My imagination is weak
right now.

I'm headed to DUG (Datatel User Group conference) next week where I
have been getting my annual fix since 1989, whether giving talks, in a
booth or whatever. I have attended Spectrum before, but it doesn't
have the same energy, excitement, youth, diversity, size, etc as DUG.
If I don't teach next year, I will not have access to attend DUG again
(I'm officially a customer), so this is likely my last year. I would
like to adopt a new conference, but Spectrum isn't enticing enough yet.
I don't see Nathan on cdp, so if you chat with him, let him know I'd
be happy to help brainstorm how it could be something that would
interest folks like me (if there other folks who think similarly).

(My DUG colleagues forced me to get out on the dance floor about 15
years ago after growing up in a "dancing is a sin" community, and I
can't get enough of it, even if it is just one day a year -- I don't
think Spectrum can compete with that, especially given the male/female
ratio, ah well...)

Do tell...who?

Anyone other than Cache'? (by the way, we love you anyway Jim ;-)

Agreed. Cheers! --dawn

"dawn" wrote:
Nathan can announce his own goals and plans for implementation. As I
see it, there are many opportunities to provide more services to the
MV market, bring more VARs to the exhibit hall, expand on the
sessions, and bring more end-users to the show. This process is
self-fulfilling in a chicken-and-egg sort of way: Creating more
community will bring out more end-users. More users means it's worth
it for more tool builders to show up and do a little more singing and
dancing to get the attention of the users. More users will also drive
more VAR/developers to the show to find out what their users are
getting so excited about. With users and VARs purchasing tools and
services to accomplish their goals, the tool builders and service
providers will be more interested in doing the shows. And more
"community" in the market should help us to bring in more business
from the outside as people see the market isn't so dead. Of course
all of this drives more business through Spectrum and provides funding
to drive the whole process.

That's just my vision from an outsider's perspective. I think Nathan
has similar ideas and we've discussed a couple things that he wants to
do that seem to lead down this path. Of course implementing it is
going to be a major deal, and I encourage anyone who shares such
visions to talk to Nathan about how you think Spectrum can benefit
everyone involved.


Let's see how the upcoming regional shows go. I predict things will
get better as Nathan drums up some of that energy, diversity, etc.

Spectrum is what we (the community) make of it - the success of the
shows is in large part due to the buzz that exhibitors create along
with the energy of the presenters and their sessions. I would
encourage people in this community to take steps now to make it what
we want rather than sitting back to see what Spectrum becomes on its
own.


E-mail addresses are on the intl-spectrum website. I'm sure he'd
welcome your participation.


Somehow I don't see the Pick market dancing for a couple years yet but
I have no idea what happened on the Queen Mary last Thursday night.


This is another topic for the vendors to bring up on their own, but as
examples:
- The MITS product is now two products and the company has adopted a
more formal approach to business and development. With over 3000
clients and a very management-oriented target audience, this subtle
shift was a good move.
- Northgate-IS is finally where they want to be with Reality 12 and
we're seeing more of a "product is ready" kind of message now, rather
than the former "product is getting there" type of message. With
reference to the Reality 12 thread from a couple weeks ago, I asked
them some pointed questions and the responses were encouraging.
- Fusionware has broken away from the GA association and is now
accentuating their cross-platform connectivity tools.
- ONware no longer requires mapping of fields between relational
databases and MV programs. This makes it even easier to run BASIC
code against Oracle or SQL Server.
- OpenInsight now has character I/O which facilitates migration.

These are some key changes which influenced the messages. Of course
other companies have product updates but their messages are pretty
consistent as they just promote their ongoing improvements.


- InterSystems was one I had in mind.
- jBASE had a press release in January which was very significant but
the booth didn't reflect the renewed dedication to the jBASE DBMS
audience. They're doing some great things over there and I hope the
next show accentuates this.

There were so many messages, new product updates, announcement of
cross-platform support, and announcements of development for upcoming
releases. The booths themselves only tell so much about what's
happening at any given company and we can't depend on the
pre-fabricated booths or product literature to convey the entire
message. The only way to get the full story is to visit the sessions
and then follow-up at the booths for details.

I would hope that all of the seminars/presentations/lectures would be
available for viewing over the Internet. However well attended the Spectrum
show might become, we are a diverse group (geographically) and the potential
audience is so much greater.

I certainly wouldn't mind paying the cost of admission to have access to
them over the Internet. It's better for everyone.
Jeff

I have no problem sharing my presentation with anyone that wants it.
Just send me an email (rickwATdesignbaisDOTcom).

FYI, if you didn't make it to Spectrum, we will be hosting another FREE
Webinar in which we give the same presentation and demo that we did at
the show. If you are not on the Spectrum email list please send me an
email and I will make sure you get the registration information.

Rick Weiser
DesignBais International

I have already raised this issue with Nathan, suggesting that even a
poorly-shot video of a presentation is better than nothing, which is
what we have historically had. Geography plays a part for people over
here as well (though there will be Spectrums in Sydney/Melbourne later
this year - I'm guessing October) - but even for the people that DO
attend, you can not go to all of the sessions you would like to attend.

I'm hopeful that this will be one of the "innovations" of the new
Spectrum organization.

However, by not attending you did miss out on the "V" product .... NO,
not THAT one - VEGEMITE!!

If anyone would like to sample this "fine" (???) Australian product,
complete with script for the "Vegemite Virgin ceremony", drop me an
email with your physical street address and I'll send you out the
Aussie version of "black gold". (Of course I WILL also include a Visage
Test Drive CD with 5 hours or so of tutorials & presentations for no
additional cost :-)

douglas (AT) pickteam (DOT) com wrote:
errr... did you come by and get a demo of this? We are only a few weeks
away and everything that we need to release was there. I would have
thought that everyone would have come and had a look - everyone that
did seemed to be profoundly impressed. We also installed it on any
machine that anyone brought it - we were just not ready with all the
installer stuff etc.

I would have thought that IO performance of 5X-15X Universe, selecting
4 criteria from 1,000,000 records in 0.08 seconds thourhg
bitmap/bitslice indexes, having objects that instantly created a file,
sql tables, web pages and a web service, and being able to use them in
BASIC, multidimentional arrays (any # of subscripts, strings included),
and all in 12 months, would have impressed anyone, and indeed it did
seem to impress those that saw it! But it seems an ADO driver from
Rainging Data was more impressive??? As John Cleese would say "There's
no pleasing some people!"

Jim