It’s that time of year where we gather for the Rational Software Development Conference, jointly hosted with developerWorks.

Here is the schedule of events and main URL for virtual conference goers.

It is going to be tough being on the heels of the Impact, the SOA all encompassing gathering recently held, also in Orlando. Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to going there and teaming with my Rational A/R pals, and seeing a group of analysts with whom I only interact with at RSDC due to their coverage areas being different from mine. This should change as the developer paradigm at IBM is encompassing both Rational and dW more and more closely.

I also can’t wait to show Steve O’Grady my striper fishing photo’s…

What used to be called Dedication Day, became Memorial Day.  The time that we remember those who served so that the western world can live in freedom.  While there hasn’t been peace since Cain and Abel, or the beginning of humans, we’ve experienced the longest time without a global conflict Among Countries.

With no due respect to John Edwards who is claiming there is no global war on terror, we do have that situation to deal with and we’ll remember those who fought to keep the conflict in the the countries instead of on our soil.

Rather than being too pithy, which I’m not, I’m going to link to those who remember it better than me….So here goes.

The list of war casualties, including the one that currently causes the greatest toll on Americans.

Don Surber with pictures of what soldiers have to live like.

A great YouTube video by Lizzie Palmer documenting who the soldier’s are, brothers, fathers, friends….

Blackfive has messages from families about the fallen, but not forgotton. 

PoliPundit shows PROGRESS being made in Bagdad.

DefenseTech has a video for those who died for our freedoms. Taps at Arlington Cemetary, very touching, it sent goosebumps down me to listen to it.  I though of my Dad who served.
Fausta’s Blog documents the LOSS of freedom in Venezuala.

Maverick News Media documents one soldier who doesn’t support the troops.

Blackfive tells a soldiers view of Memorial Day. …..for a soldier who paid the ultimate price.

Blackfive hows to honor our heros.

All in all, it is a day to remember hero’s, and everyday people who served for you and me.  So that Americans and British can speak english, French can speak French,  Chinese and most of the pacific speak their language.

Thank you.

This is the second installment of this series trying to note the differences in constituencies. While it is obvious to those of us in the Analyst industry, it is not so elsewhere, thus this post.

First, the analysts have generally worked in the IT world, as a developer or struggled in a company in this industry before they were an analyst. They write about the issues of the IT world from this perspective. For the most part, the press are journalists first, who happen to write about technology, and are pressured by the deadlines and competition to publish. As my colleague Amy Loomis describes it, the press are the tip of the iceberg, and the analysts are the rest in terms of size. Please do not take offense if you are a journalist, I am merely setting the table. I appreciate the pressures and difficulties of that career, having working in PR for eons.

Briefing the two can not therefore be the same. For journalists, one must pitch the story and deliver the goods in an appealing enough way so that the journalist will consider listening longer than 5 minutes unless you are a highly trusted source. They are pitched 1000’s of times a day on how great and new a product is. At conferences we attend, a press meeting takes 30 minutes where quotes are given, material to write about a story and a few names are handed out. The qualified journalist can then turn this into an appropriate story with little trouble.

This causes the analyst relations folks no end of trouble when we deal on this timeline. The depth that we need to get to given the challenging questions we are asked by analysts take a minimum of an hour, and this is for a conference where we are time driven. For a report, MQ, Wave, Vendor Study, name it by firm….we can take days to get the proper amount of information covered, depending on the analyst.

How to do it is of course a function of style.  David Rossiter describes it this way:

1) When it comes to the presentation…less is more.
2) Know your audience.
3) KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid).
4) Tell me why you are different.
5) Talk about what makes your customers different.
6) Tell me where you are going to be in 3 years.
7) Passion can not be faked.

Here is another description of how to screw it up:

1. Showing complimentary quotes, market projections or assessments from competing analyst firms

2. Hounding analysts with invitations - and then not being available when the analyst try’s to make contact

3. Claiming to be the first vendor to do something, based on obscure statistics

4. Trying to rewrite analyst opinions or recommendations (correcting factual errors is fine, and completely encouraged)

5. Sending a 60 slide deck for a 30 minute briefing and / or spending the first 20 minutes of the briefing on “positioning” - in particular when asked to skip this or speed it up

6. Sending a constant stream of press releases about insignificant developments

7. Assuming all analysts live in Cambridge, Mass.

No discussion of this would be complete without a post from James Governer, who I view as excellent on messaging:

Briefing comes from “brief”, which means concise. A deck with 50 slides is not suitable for a briefing, or a one hour conversation. If you want to pay an analyst to help you with focus, then by all means come along with a hundred charts. But if its value you want, and some time to gain insights from the analysts knowledge of the market, its players and dynamics, then keep your slide deck short.

Next, what you say.  Anything said to a reporter, either off or on the record is ON THE RECORD.  This is not the case with most analysts.   There have been times that something got into print that shouldn’t have, but rarely was it malicious.  Mostly it was a misunderstanding of what was NDA or not.   They are not interested in breaking a company’s secrets, even though we tell them almost everything we are going to do.  Why would you bite the hand that feeds you?

So to the audience that I’m directing this to, and you know who you are, be clear that the press are not the analysts.  Two missions, two different depths of understanding, two different objectives….let’s treat them that way.

I’m going to go through another experience such as this, so blogging has been light. It hasn’t left me particularly jovial.

I found that most of the podcasts on iTunes fell into the 90% of Sturgeon’s Law. By chance from my NewsGator feed, I found a really good review podcast of 24 via Slate.com.

“You’re cursed Jack, everything you touch one way or another winds up dead”

We’re here for the annual partner pilgrimage, this year in St. Louis. I remarked on the bus in when folks were comparing notes, that I’d been to every PartnerWorld, and BPEC’s before that. Not sure that’s a good thing.

A lot goes on behind the scenes to make sure that briefings go as they should and on time. Here is a picture of the workroom.

Steve Mills was the main IBM speaker the Software forum. He might not open in Las Vegas or Broadway, but he’s the straightest shooter I’ve seen. He told the audience exactly what our marketshare was, what we’re going to do and what we want the partners to do that. Ballmer could take lessons here.

The absolute highlight was listening to Mario Andretti speak about his life. He told of having communism take away his family farms as the state controls everything. Take note as to why communism fails everytime. He then lived in a labor camp for 7 years while waiting for a visa to the USA. His father told them it was the land of dreams and opportunity, which proved to be true. While he told of his life and racing career, he also told of the lessons that we all can take away. You will have changes in life, you must deal with it. Life is not always fair, but you have to deal with it. Triumph and tragedy can come on the same day, deal with it. I got my picture taken with him and an autograph.

Click to enlarge
When I was young, my father took me to see sports car races. Many times I watched Mario decimate the field, so this was a connection to my childhood.

I can’t complain about anything today. My colleague Patty Rowell was late as plane caught on fire while on the way to St. Louis. They landed safely, albeit 3 hours short which they had to traverse by bus. I later had dinner with her and Don Neely and found out all was well.

Later, on the showroom floor, I found much more than the normal booth activity going on. Many of the analysts were talking to partners asking them questions ranging from SaaS, Web 2.0 to how is it to work with IBM, both good and bad. How do I know this? Both the booth workers and the analyst’s told me it happened. I hope we do well on the reports that are being written about our Partnering activities.

Here is Aleesa Talmadge of our SaaS team with Bob Wilson of Axentis, one of our SaaS partners.

Sam gave the keynote today and discussed a number of topics. Here is a link to his keynote and other PartnerWorld announcements.

I came to see what he had to say as he is our leader. I was always a big fan of Lou Gerstner and I thought he was quite a visionary. I often criticized those that said he made too much money. Anyone that can lead a company this successfully deserves anything he made. That is how I feel about Sam.

During this presentation, it made me glad that he was leading our company. It’s not a mainframe company anymore, nor is it the same company that Lou Gerstner saved and turned around. Sam gets that the world is different and is making sure IBM addresses this. I’ve always said you have to re-invent yourself and change or get left behind. He sees this. He is changing the way we do business and showed this by how much we are doing with partners. It also came out when he focused on innovation and integration.

He started out with a quick discussion of how IBM was doing financially and the revenue breakdowns. I was afraid that this was leading to a stockholders briefing which wouldn’t be appropriate for a group of partners, but he was sensitive to the audience.

The key to the discussion was that there is a strategic shift in our makeup, and the marketplace. The industry has changed and so have we. What he didn’t say was that other companies may not be adjusting to this shift. To set this up, he described the old days we moved away from as the PC/Client-Server generation. IBM divested of these technologies as they are no longer the model we are set upon.

What we are concentrating ourselves on is an open, flexible, collaborative, autonomic direction with a premium on innovation and imbedding technology to drive innovation deeper.

He covered that in a CIO study, clients, employees and business partners are best source of innovation, which is why collaboration is most important. It was noted that collaboration was the word he used most other than participles.

Sam discussed new client needs generated by new possibilities and used the rising tide of globalization (globally integrated enterprise)

There use to be many IBM’s that were separate IBM’s by country which was effective for older times, but now that model is slow and bureaucratic and not effective. Globalization is the direction that allows us to move faster and more flexibly.

We now trust partners to represent IBM brand in the marketplace, and collaboration creates economic value for IBM and partners and societies we work with around the world. In fact, 50% of what we do is with a partner, growing at 6 to 7% a year. SMB is our biggest opportunity, and in a couple of years, it will be our biggest business sector/customer set. It will outpace financial markets to be the leading revenue sector for IBM.

Switching to software, he noted that we’re the leader in SOA. Why is it taking off? Business Models, business owners don’t want to wait 5 years to get value, They want short cycles for innovation and quicker ROI.

On web 2.0 - it will go to business. While it started with sharing music or relationships with similar interests, it will go to business at the end of the day. When there is a justification and return, this is like the early days of the internet.

Emerging markets are a large opportunity for all of us, something like 250 billion. IBM is making massive investments in the BRIC countries, and we’ve added hundreds of partners for coverage in those geographies as they open up outlets to take growth to the marketplace.
As far as acquisitions, when we buy companies it is to compete in the future, not to consolidate industry or to buy marketshare as some do. We are not going to be the next GE, or a holding company. Our strategy is integration, innovation, collaboration. On this he highlighted that trust and personal responsibility in all relationships, especially with our partners.

Even though he showed a graph at the beginning, he said that our business is not about software, hardware or services only, rather we have to come together to work. We are a big company that has a lot of partners, so we have to have principles. Successful companies must be trusted, otherwise you are just a component supplier, and we know that this is not a model for success. If we can’t get it right to conduct business across borders and be trusted, then governments will do what they do, which is regulate.

We must recognize corporate responsibility and trust in our partners…this had a lot of principle to me.