The Life of a Silicon Valley Rockstar

Yeah, I’m going to get geeky for a bit and do a daily update from the UC Strategies conference, called UCS forthwith because I’m lazy. I’ll also be tweet’ing on things especially interesting, or not. For those who care outside of the car service that took me to FireSky I haven’t seen any ASU hotties roaming around, but the night is young. Side note, the wireless here is dog slow, no offense to dogs.

I saw Don Van Doren who I recently referenced in a Hyperconnectivity.com article. Kinda cool to meet someone you’ve only seen online. I’m hoping Don and I can chat over a beer later as we seem to think similiarly on the UC topic.

So far they managed to screw up my badge… How do you take:
Alex Lewis, CISSP
Principal Consultant
Convergent Computing
http://www.cco.com
alex@cco.com
and decide “CISSP” is the company name?

That clerical error aside I’m hoping it gets a bit better. There was only one session so far. It was led by Kerry Shih. His spiel was that unified communications is the new golden goose of startups. Hmm. It sounded an awful lot like a 45min advertisement for his new company with some basic UC101 and startup102 definitions thrown in. Maybe I’m spoiled living in silicon valley, where everyone’s an entrepreneur and I can have breakfast at Buck’s of Woodside, lunch at Lion and Compass, then drinks at Straits or Cielo on the Row? Anyway, as much as I respect it’s tough out there for a pimp (ie. entrepreneur) I didn’t get much from the presentation. Wasn’t that supposed to be his point, “Differentiate yourself”?

Next up is the official welcome wagon with Jim Burton leading the Opening Address… (will update after)
Next update… Jim Burton’s opening address and thoughts on UC adoption confirm my thoughts on the topic. Jim’s a bit detached from the end user community just by the nature of his choice to work with vendors only but he manages to maintain a firm grasp on new technology barriers to adoption and a 50,000 foot view of the market. All in all seems to be a really smart guy. Next up with Mark Straton of Siemens. He made the point that Siemens was way ahead of the curve with their UC solution back in 2003… uhh, yeah, so was Apple with the Newton. I think Siemens will maintain superior marketshare in europe on the voice side, but I’m not sure they’ll see widespread UC adoption in spite of their OEM agreement to IBM. Microsoft’s case is just too compelling, and PBX/VoIPVender agnostic, to be denied.

I had to leave a bit early to meet with Philip Mathew of Motorola to catch up and discuss some business. Philip and I worked previously on the Motorola acquisitions of Terayon, Modulus, Netopia and a few others. That’s all for tonight. I’ll be sure to add a new post tomorrow. Looks like I’ll be participating in all the sessions except one. Not a bad day!