Fernando Salazar

Once again the yearly pilgrimage to Orlando for Lotusphere 2012 is upon us. In addition to the flurry of customer meetings and catching the occasional session, I’m co-speaking at a session, with my colleague Marc Pagnier. Marc is a Sametime Product Manager and our talk is :

ID218 – Private or public?
Take your Social Business to the cloud with IBM Sametime® & IBM Connections®

(See all the LS sessions here:
ibmtvdemo.edgesuite.net/software/lotus/lotusphere/lssessions.pdf)

Working at home today I’m doing some tune-ups on my part of the talk. I can’t help but think back to my first Lotusphere breakout. It was 1998 and I was then working on the well-intentioned but ill-fated eSuite product. Anyway my boss and my colleagues all say, “Go to Lotusphere and give a talk, you’ll love it.” Impressionable lad that I was (relatively speaking) I say ok and start prepping the talk, which was about app-dev with eSuite applets and our nascent AJAX-like functions. I had done talks for small groups before. Well the end of the story is, when I show up to give my talk I’m amazed — the room holds 700 people and my talk is SRO. I’m lucky I had drilled over and over because if I stopped to think about the situation I’m sure I would have been paralyzed. The talk went well — though I was on auto-pilot talking and answering questions I never noticed the AV guy in the back frantically waving the “1 min left” sign.

The show’s much different now … not many 700 person break-outs. But Lotusphere is still the highlight of the Lotus year. If you’re there and you want to meet I’ll be at my talk of course, and at MTD some times.