We’re pleased to announce that we’re sponsoring Chicago’s first MashMeet, an event designed to bring Chicago’s best Web 2.0 startups together for a night of social networking (the in-person variety, not the online kind).
Here are the details:
7:00 – 10:00 PM, November 29th, 2007
Fulton Lounge, 955 West Fulton Market, Chicago, IL
The event is open to all and no RSVP is required. Hope to see you there!
The concepts behind Web 2.0, social networks, and collaboration are now poised to transform your enterprise, providing solutions such as collaborative mashups, expertise discovery and social search to enhance your existing portal.
According to Gartner, Web 2.0 will have a major impact on a broad range of traditional enterprises. Gartner states that “positive business model change will result in unexpected ways, and enterprises must prepare for this transition.”
Register to attend this exciting seminar on Wednesday, November 14th, 6:00 pm and hear how BEA’s three new products will “two-dot-oh” your company’s Web along with other topics that include:
Enjoy free hors d’oeuvres and an open bar along with presentations that define Web 2.0 and show how BEA’s new social computing products Pages, Ensemble and Pathways can deliver true business value from Web 2.0 and bdg’s newest products that bridge the gap between Web 2.0 and the enterprise.
Attendance is limited, so please take a moment to register now. I look forward to meeting you at the event.
Date: Wednesday, November 14th
Time: 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Location: Marriott Tyson’s Corner
8028 Leesburg Pike
Vienna, VA, 22182
(703) 734-3200
Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)
Posted by: geoffgarcia on January 17, 2008 at 1:33 PM
From an e-mail I just received:
Mark your calendar today to attend a gathering of BEA customers, partners and product experts in Chicago, Illinois from May 12-15th, 2008.
BEAParticipate 2008, is a 2 ½ day event for our user community of innovators, to share experiences and best practices around the adoption of business process management, collaboration, portal and social computing technologies.
This coming year will feature more networking opportunities than ever — from industry roundtables, lunches, and evening receptions, to a partner and solution pavilion and product focus groups. This is a sure-fire opportunity to form lasting connections with your peers, and gain valuable insights from shared experiences in a hands-on, energetic setting.
Whether you are just starting out or have a long docket of active projects, this is the best forum to meet with BEA executives, engineering and product leaders, pick up useful tidbits from other innovative customers, and acquire new strategies for optimizing your business, improving knowledge worker productivity and increasing IT efficiency.
Don’t miss this interactive and social event! If you are interested in participating, have suggestions for topics, or have any questions, please send an e-mail to Participate.
Save the Date:
BEAParticipate 2008
May 12-15, 2008
Hyatt Regency
151 East Wacker Drive
Chicago, Illinois 60601
To learn more about the Hyatt Regency in the heart of Chicago, click here.
Stay tuned for registration information, agenda and pricing details in the coming weeks.
Here I am on the last day of BEA Participate awarding a Video iPod to Niren Patel, who accepted the winning iPod on behalf of his coworker Karl Cepull. Congratulations!
I already held Mark Carges in very high esteem — but my respect for him grew immensely this morning when I found out that he wrote the source for Tuxedo some 23 years ago while he was a student at NYU! Very cool . . . .
Mark opened by talking about the reasons that BEA is hosting this conference. Mostly it was a response to the lukewarm feedback about BEA World from ex-Plumtree and ex-Fuego customers who wanted “something more.” (You can read some of this feedback on an earlier post on my blog.)
The focus of Participate is three-fold: Portals, BPM and “Social Computing.” Clearly that maps to ALUI, ALBPM and PEP (Pages, Ensemble and Pathways), the new AquaLogic product initiatives.
Before getting into the meat of his talk, Mark gave some background on BEA’s overall corporate strategy. Their vision entails facilitating the migration from “traditional” applications to “situational” applications. This message is nothing new, but for the benefit of those who are new to the message, I summarized the difference between these two types of application development below:
Mark then went into a short aside about the way long-tail or “rogue” applications have sprung up throughout the enterprise, facilitated by applications like Lotus Notes, Excel and E-mail/IM. My ears perked up a bit because bdg has identified that e-mail distribution of Excel spreadsheets (and other office documents) is one “business process” that prevails in the enterprise and the one thing upon which we could improve drastically with the right web-based, ECM-driven collaborative tool. Project Excelerator, which is something under active development at bdg, attempts to address this problem in a novel way. You’ll be hearing much more about this product as we get closer to a ship date.
More on Mark’s description of the overall strategy of BEA: he commented that BEA’s focus on business innovation, business and IT agility and technology optimization brings a strong competitive advantage to all of their customers. He gave four examples of this:
At this point, Mark shifted gears and started a segment called “Bringing Web 2.0 to the Enterprise.” He highlighted the gap between what you can do at home (consumer web) vs. the enterprise. He then gave several examples of consumer web sites that have compelling use cases for the enterprise. Those examples included digg.com, del.icio.us, Redfin and wikipedia. I’m sure most of you already know what those sites do, so I’ll skip right to the part about how, at least thematically, they could be applied to the enterprise.
The culture of collaboration and participation started by digg could be used to rank the best sales tools or the best content and the rest of the enterprise community could benefit from this ranking. del.icio.us highlights the power in implicit connections and makes research about different topics much easier, including finding content and people. At work, you could use a del.icio.us-like tool to view content by group/experts, create organic groups of business organizations and leverage the wisdom of the crowd. The concepts implemented by Redfin, a slick real-estate mashup started by Plumtree founder Glenn Kelman, could be used to show a single view of the customer (where info is stored in different systems) including purchased products, support incidents, account team, etc. Lastly, the “long-tail” economics proven to work beautifully in the world of encyclopedias (with Wikipedia) could be used to track the competition, collectively write about competitors and share competitive knowledge, add RSS feeds, add anecdotes and edit everything collaboratively.
Mark closed his keynote with a brief introduction to BEA’s three new products: Pages, Ensemble and Pathways. You’ll be hearing much more about these great initiatives as the conference continues, so stay tuned!
Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)
Posted by: plaird on May 7, 2007 at 6:16 PM
Answer? Count the number of sessions given by each here: Participate Session List
Posted by: plaird on May 7, 2007 at 6:36 PM
Posted by: mbenitez on May 7, 2007 at 8:21 PM
Posted by: jonmountjoy on May 7, 2007 at 8:50 PM
Posted by: plaird on May 7, 2007 at 9:10 PM
Posted by: mbenitez on May 7, 2007 at 9:53 PM
All of us at bdg are starting to get excited about BEA Participate! As you already know, we’re sponsoring this year’s ALUI and ALBPM event and I’m giving a demo of some slick integration between ALUI (ALI and ALI Collaboration), ALDSP and ALSB that illustrates how AquaLogic can be used to implement an SOA.
We’ll also be giving away some cool — yet practical — gizmos that will be sure to brighten your day. Literally.
Be sure to come by the bdg booth, pick up a free gift, and enter to win this year’s grand prize — a 30 Gb Video iPod, in bdg black (of course).
Whether it’s at my talk/demo, at the bdg booth or anywhere else, we look forward to seeing you at the conference.
I’ve been invited to give the following talk at BEA Participate:
Why is a Service-Oriented Architecture important to an IT infrastructure and what are the elements and products needed to build out an SOA? These questions answered, plus a discussion on how portals are the practical starting point to leveraging SOA.
Quite honestly, the title and abstract make it sound like an invitation to engage in a lively game of buzzword bingo, but I assure you this talk will be light on the trite — you won’t hear me use the acronym SOA more than once or twice — and heavy on the real deal, rubber-meets-the-road stuff about how mere mortals/human beings are actually accomplishing the sort of things that SOA evangelists are preaching these days.
So, here’s what you can expect: I’ll talk a bit about some of the challenges of building integrated user experiences in today’s enormously complex and heterogeneous IT environment and show how a software developer — without superpowers — can piece together an integrated true-to-the-principals-of-SOA application using ALUI, ALDSP (Data Services Platform) and ALESB (Enterprise Service Bus). This will culminate in an actual, real-life demo.
I will of course make sure to sacrifice a chicken to the Almighty Goddess of Demos or do whatever else I have to do to make sure my demo doesn’t crash. Scratch that, I’ll just run it on Linux and everything will be fine.
So, all joking aside, if you have any ideas for items you’d like me to include in (or exclude from) my talk, please post your comments here. I’ll be sure to give anyone who makes a good suggestion a “shout out” during my presentation. They’re actually giving me a whole hour this time, so they’ll be room for plenty of tomfoolery, geekspeak, silly anecdotes and still time to answer your insightful questions at the end. As one of my good friends and business partners said following my talk at last year’s BEA World,
you never know what to expect during one of [Chris Bucchere’s] talks.
I’m not sure exactly what he meant, but of course I took it as a compliment.
In closing, while we’re on the subject of BEA Participate, I just wanted to say thanks to Christine “Obi” Wan for giving me the opportunity to present and, more importantly, for putting together such a great-looking agenda, which you can review if you like, because now it’s posted on the BEA Participate site.
In the meantime, do your best to convince the powers that be at your company/organization that they will finally discover the secret to “leveraging SOA” if they send you to this conference. Also, please don’t mention that every past Odyssey has had several open bars.
Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)
Posted by: Bryazgin on April 13, 2007 at 7:03 AM
Posted by: Bryazgin on April 13, 2007 at 7:25 AM
To illustrate how not being “seamless” is actually a good thing, I’ve designed a demo system that involves bits of LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP), bits of Java, bits of .NET and bits of Adobe Flash all held together with seams built with ALDSP, ALESB and ALUI. I’m still working on the technical side of things, but the use case is simple: a sales rep wants to quote his customer. Behind the scenes, his company is running a LAMP CRM server, a Flash/SQLServer product database, a .NET portal, and a Java-based Collaboration Server. Using a hybrid of ALDSP, ALESB and Java and .NET web services, the user experience is easy and seamless, but behind the scenes, it’s the powerful seams supported by ALDSP and ALESB that make this not only possible, but fairly straightforward.
If you’re interested in hearing more, register for BEA Participate and [shameless plug]come to my talk[/shameless plug]! By the way, I’m co-presenting with Joseph Stanko, the BEA Engineering Manager responsible for the development of Ensemble (formerly known as Project Runner) — he will run several slides to help you understand the theory behind SOA and I will show the reality of how the AquaLogic stack truly enables SOA in the enterprise.
Posted by: bucchere on April 14, 2007 at 6:07 AM
If you’re “participating” it would great to see you at our talk or at the bdg booth. This year we have a cool — yet practical — giveway that will definitely brighten your day. Looking forward to the conference!
Posted by: bucchere on April 22, 2007 at 7:52 PM
Here’s some more shameless self-promotion (isn’t that what blogging is all about?) — we’ve just been confirmed as a sponsor for BEA Participate 2007.
Look for more details about our role in the upcoming conference here.
Hope to see you there!
This just in: BEA has announced that they will be hosting a user conference for ALUI and ALBPM customers and prospects. This conference is called “BEA Participate” and all the details can be found at http://www.bea.com/participate. As of this posting, there’s not much more than a “Save the Date,” which, BTW, is May 6th-9th, 2007. Seeing as how BID’s new products (Runner, Builder and Graffiti) will be nearing General Availability at that time, I would expect to see some very cool demos.
Watch this space for more info about bdg’s role in the conference!
A quiet little announcement was made last week: BEA plans to host an ALUI (formerly Plumtree) and ALBPM (formerly Fuego) user conference! Suprisingly, I don’t see any references on BEA’s web site, on dev2dev or really anywhere else about it, so I thought I would take a minute to promote the conference here.
Could this be a response to some customer and integrator concerns that there weren’t enough AL* breakout sessions at BEA World 2006? Possibly. Could this be the final nail in the coffin that was once called the “Unified Portal Roadmap.” I’m not sure.
Regardless, you can bet that I’ll be there along with several other folks from bdg. Stayed tuned for more information here about how we’ll be involved as an event sponsor, exhibitor and perhaps even as a presenter. I expect that we’ll have a lot of fun, share a great deal of what we know about ALUI and learn a great deal more from ALUI customers and other BEA partners.
The full extent of the information that currently exists about this conference can be found at http://www.bea.com/participate. We’ll be watching that space for more info and also posting several more times about our specific role in the conference. I suggest you do the same.
One obvious question any customer or partner should ask is: if I’m getting my budget together for 2007 conferences, should I attend BEA World or BEA Participate? If you’re a current ALUI or ALBPM customer, it’s a no brainer: attend BEA Participate. But what if you’re a prospect who is considering a portal or SOA solution from BEA? If you can afford it, I would say attend both!
Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)
I have to be careful how I word this, so if the tone comes across in any way negative, well… that’s not my intention. IMO I would not attend BEA World again if it’s a repeat of last year’s.
I loved Odyssey – it was well organized, had _great_ sessions targeted toward user education and productivity, and was all about the customer – sharing best practices, discussing common problems, and engaging in one-on-one w/ engineers and product managers. Sessions were focused on empowering the customer and making sure they were just a bit better at their jobs when they left. It was always worthwhile and our entire team (repeatedly) came away saying “glad we went.” Awesome stuff all around and did a lot to let the customers sell the solutions to other customers (always a better way to go).
In attending BEA World last year I got the constant nagging sensation that it was a big (overt) sales conference and not really about the user and how to better utilize tools. ALUI was barely even on the map (which really bothers me). I didn’t have the sense that my needs were being addressed as much as in previous years and I really didn’t come away with anything “tangible” I could take back to justify the fee. The customer keynotes were cool, but beyond that we struggled to find value.
Doing something with a “Participate” focus thing is a _great_ idea on the part of BEA if it’s about targeting the customer and helping understand how to succeed with the tools (and make friends along the way ;). Keywords: using the tools to succeed in business. That, IMO, was always the point to me in attending.
Obi-wan – hear me. This should really be incorporated into BEA World for the benefit of your current and prospective customers. It will really boost the value of BEA World and do something to hammer home the fact that BEA and Plumtree are one company with one comprehensive suite (something Jay Simons’ web conference last year did a great job of explaining). Separating things like this … well… I get it, but it does imply a continued level of separation that customers expressed concern with last year.
That said – and I sincerely hope that didn’t come across as negative – I’m excited to see what 2007 brings for the new products. Seeing a bit of what they’re cooking up, it’s nice to users finally getting past a lot of the geekware bits and into things they can build and use w/o IT bottlenecks. Very cool. Buy three 🙂
Posted by: ewwhitley on February 12, 2007 at 7:28 AM
And it is an important complement to BEAWorld, providing much richer detail on these two specific product lines and more focus on bringing these specific users together in a forum where they can share experiences and ideas. The announcement last week was just a Save-the-Date. Stayed tuned, you’ll see a lot more information to come on the bea.com homepage and bea.com/participate.
Posted by: cwan on February 12, 2007 at 2:09 PM
Posted by: ewwhitley on February 12, 2007 at 7:51 PM
Posted by: kurtanderson on February 15, 2007 at 10:05 PM