After about two and a half hours sleep, thanks to the fine folks at the O’Hare Hilton who didn’t let me into my room last night until about 1:30 because they were “cleaning it” (seriously, they couldn’t come up with anything better than that?), I was off to hot and humid Raleigh/Durham for a quick presentation on SOA. It turned out to be even quicker than I anticipated, because the speaker before me covered a ton of ground, but my main message to an audience comprised primarily of SOA focused ISVs was that they are to platform vendors as extensions are to Firefox: the variety that keeps the whole thing interesting. From the few comments I had time to take before dashing back to the airport to catch my flight back to Chicago (thanks for the assistance there, John), it seems that the message resonated with at least a few of the attendees. Whether or not they bought my broader definition of what precisely constitutes a service was less clear. While I’m on the subject of R/D, my apologies to Bill & Bobby for not being able to meet up; look forward to sitting down with you guys on a subsequent trip.
In other news, confirming yet again the power of blogs was the comment I received on yesterday’s post from the recipients of tomorrow’s presentation – the Eclipse gang – which reminded me that I was not, in fact, staying at the O’Hare Hilton tonight but the Wyndham O’Hare. Even better, Eclipse’s Ian Skerrett has kindly given me permission to post the deck from tomorrow’s session (which, taking a page from the subject matter, borrows some stylistic cues from my blog) so that you can get an idea of what I’ll be talking to them about. It speaks well of their grasp of conversational marketing that the ok was given so readily, but what would you expect from the folks that have so actively embraced transparent marketing? 🙂
Anyhow, I’ve got to go put the final touches on the deck, but given that the sessions don’t start until lunch I should in theory have time to get something more substantive down tomorrow morning. So it’s off to finish a slide or two, then a well deserved 10 PM bedtime.
