By Aaron Sweemer published: Wednesday, September 17 2008
As expected my alarm went off at 4AM, but I was already up. My customers are
on the east coast, three hours ahead of Las Vegas, and my mind started
spinning with all the catch up work and emails I needed to complete before
they got into the office. And after a few hours of administration work, I
started getting ready for day zero, partner day.
It was no shocker to see a bunch of sensational press announcements from
competitors right out of the gates, hours before the day before the first
official day of the event began. Everyone seemed to be trying to out do
everyone else. "My product rocks, your product sucks" and similar statements
abound. I mean seriously, I think I even saw a VMware competitor CEO break
out a ruler and start to unzip his pants ... but I could be wrong about this
one :) Anyway, as much as I'd love go through each press release in detail,
I'm already late in delivering this post. So in the interest of brevity, in
a later post I'll go through some (if not all) of the press releases and
give my take on each.
As I entered the main conference area, I was surprised to see the sheer
volume of people, especially on partner day. I instantly wondered, "if there
are this many people here now, what will it be like tomorrow?" I didn't get
to attend any of the breakout sessions and/or labs. The reason was simply
due to my packed schedule. And I seemed to get pulled into one impromptu
meeting after another.
In the latter part of the day, the Solutions Exchange (aka the exhibitor's
hall where all the booths, demos and sales people congregate, waiting to
pounce) opened with enough food, beer and wine that would certainly satisfy
Britney Spears for at least an hour or two.
At the conclusion of the day's event, I was only half way done. I had a full
evening of customer meetings, dinners and socializing to do. And here I am,
hours later, typing this up as fast as possible so I can get a few hours of
sleep before it all starts over again tomorrow.
Tomorrow starts at 8AM with a keynote speech by Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware.
I'll get out my notes on his keynote as soon as possible.
