In Austin today, several vendors, open and closed source, and even some customers are meeting at barcampESM to take a community-driven go at fixing things in the mucky world of IT Management. Like any lump of software that commonly wears clothing from Enterprise Row, things have gotten a little complex, but in a billable way in IT Management. Some call it “ESM,” others call it systems management, network management. Whatever you wan to call “keep all those damn computers running and making us money” it’s an area of software that this group wants a stronger community for.
What would “community” mean here? It means getting all the duplicate efforts to share rather than keep proprietary: establishing standards, using open source, and at the very least being friendly enough with each other to help solve the high level, conceptual problems. We expect this type of community in the Web 2.0 world, in wikipedia, and less sexy areas of nerd-land like Java middleware. But in IT management. Yeah, good luck thumbing your way to the Rainbow Data-center, bub.
On the face of it, there’s not that many people here. Post lunch, I count 17-20, depending on who’s out smoking or getting a their newly sprained ankle taken care of. But, the impressive part are the types of people here and how interactive the conversations are.
If a barcamp goes of right, as this one is largely doing, you have a mix of mid-level and low-level people in the software development chain who end up swapping war-stories and practices rather than business models and PowerPoints. Nothing wrong with the last two at all – I enjoy those equally- barcampESM is just a few steps removed from those aspects of the software life-cycle.
Next up in the post pile are entries on sessions and topics that came up. Stay tuned!
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