Lotusphere Comes to You - WTF is happening in Austria?

„Lotusphere Comes to You” is, according to IBM, an event series featuring presentations designed to bring anyone who couldn’t get to Orlando the critical messages and the excitement they missed.

So you would think that IBM has an interest, that these events convey certain messages, are run in an orderly fashion, etc. Well, in theory. Now take a look what’s happening in Austria.

There are at least three different offers for Lotusphere recaps, four, if you count in edcom’s offer in Munich:

• Lotusphere Wrap Up by ILS, which is listed at IBMs website (Vienna, Salzburg, Graz)
• Lotusphere Essence .08 by Fritz & Macziol (Vienna, Salzburg)
• bat-groupware Collaboration World 2008 by bat-groupware/notes consulting (Vienna)
• LCTY - edcom Nachlese 08 by edcom (Munich)

So in the little country of Austria, you got (counting in all repeats) SEVEN possible events to get the information presented at Lotusphere 2008. Crazy, isn’t it?

Also the events differ. Where bat-groupware offers one day of a Lotus/MS overview, edcom does two days in Munich, including several top notch IBM speakers that also did Keynotes at Lotusphere (Ron Sebastian, Niklas Heidloff, …(. Fritz & Macziol offers a whole day in either Salzburg or Vienna and ILS distills all the information in half a day in Salzburg, Graz and Vienna.

The „bat-groupware Collaboration World 2008” (one day) and „Lotusphere Wrap Up” (half day) are free of charge, the one day of „Lotusphere Essence .08” is going to cost you 198 Euros and for two days at edcom’s „Mini-Lotusphere” you get charged 980 Euros.

All these events are organized by IBM Business Partners and I can absolutely understand that they want to show off in front of their customers and don’t want to share this event with the competition. But for a Notes customer, these events do not make any sense at all. How should I decide, in which event I should take part? If you ask me, edcom is probably offering the best value – for a steep price. But this is probably the closest you get to an European Lotusphere (if you don’t count in the ILUG). But other then that, you probably either stick with your business partner or choose based on the date that fits in your schedule.

What I don’t understand is why IBM is allowing such a distributed approach. This IMHO hurts the Lotus brand and acceptance in Austria. Apart from the fact that the economies of scale won’t work for each individual approach.

Unfortunately, the Austrian Notes User Group (ANUG) is in hiatus/hibernation since 2004(?) and has not published a single news item or organized a single event in the last years. Maybe I should contact the few big Lotus customers I know in Austria, revive the ANUG and offer a business partner independent, consolidated „ANUG Lotusphere Comes to You” event next year. What do you think? Would that work?

As I was lucky enough to attend Lotusphere (yeah, that summary of mine is still in the works), I will probably skip all mentioned events (but I wouldn’t shy away from personal invitations ;)).

Tagged as: ibm, lotus, lotusphere, notes, rant | Author: Martin Leyrer
[Mittwoch, 20080206, 10:54 | permanent link | 1 Kommentar(e)