![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.ibm.com\/smarterplanet\/global\/images\/us__en_us__overview__sp_home_spot5_3ideas__359x299.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I am in Las Vegas for IBM Impact 2010<\/a>– Big Blue’s business alignment\/middleware event. Why am I missing a bank holiday weekend for a tech show? Because this is one of the most important events of the year- if you’re an enterprisey geek, that is. IBM is a major Redmonk client, and I have been covering IBM middleware for 15 years now.<\/p>\n The main reason to be here- the people. Clients, friends, prospects, there will be as many people here for Impact as the Mayweather fight…<\/p>\n Having a paid gig while I am here doesn’t hurt either, and explains my early arrival. I will be presenting tomorrow at Sandy Carter<\/a>‘s Cool Cloud Cash workshop<\/a> – which is all about how IBM business partners can make money from the cloud. I will be talking\u00a0 about onboarding and hand-holding, workload analysis and triage, security and data governance, and explaining why the cloud is just the same old burger<\/a>, with a new relish.<\/p>\n Cloud will of course be a big deal at Impact this year, and I have to say IBM has done some outstanding work in the last 12 months in the space. There should be some meaty announcements to take in.<\/p>\n One of my key focus areas while I am here will be on WebSphereMQ and MQTT, messaging oriented middleware. I will be encouraging IBM executives to wake up to the web and the volume messaging opportunity.\u00a0 A smarter planet is NOT a top down planet. Watch out Nancy Pearson and Craig Hayman! \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n Talking of Smarter Planet, I’m glad that we now have a horizontal technology business at IBM Software Group<\/a>, rather than trying to squeeze everything through a vertical industry focus. RedMonk watches technology, and we’re pretty good at that.<\/p>\n