(Photographer: Eric Mack)

After my IT Manager 2.0 tutorial this morning, I had a schedule-slammed afternoon of back-to-back meetings. It was wonderful! First I met with a vendor who is still in stealth-mode, and he told me a bit about their work. I look forward to writing more when I can. Then I had 20 or so minutes with the Managing Director of a collaboration consultancy, comparing notes on how we each work and what type of work we each do.

At 2pm I met for an hour with Ken Bisconti, the VP of Messaging and Collaboration Software for the IBM Software Group. Among other things, Ken showed off the forthcoming Connections offering and Quickr, and we discussed some of the potential futures for each. It was a neat session.

At 3.30pm I had 20 minutes with Adam Gartenberg from IBM, talking about Unified Communications and Collaboration. We again talked about some of the potential futures for the IBM UCC portfolio, and Adam mentioned the “Instant Share” plug-in that’s coming soon for Sametime 7.5.1, which enables someone to instantly share their screen with Sametime with others. He also highlighted some of the neat integrations that partners are doing with Sametime, such as how Dassault Systems has integrated presence information from Sametime tightly into its product design tool. One of the key insights for me out of my talk with Adam is the need for and thus the value of IBM’s strong partnering strategy for Sametime. This is critical when you realize that whereas organizations often have only one or two email platforms, they may have a plethora of telephony platforms from different vendors within and across divisions and departments. And thus for integration like “Click-to-Call” within Sametime, the server has to be able to integrate tightly with many different telephony platforms.

At 4pm I met with one of the participants of the LaunchPad event I’m moderating on Wednesday afternoon on the main stage here at the Conference. There will be four companies presenting the cool new stuff that they are doing (and the identities are secret until then), and so today one of them had some last minute questions. We talked about those, and they’re good to go. Each participating company has 6 minutes to present, and the lead presenter from this one asked me if I would keep them to time. “Oh yes” said I. Actually, it will be to the second too. 😉

At 4.30pm it was a geek-out session with Eric Mack and Marc Orchant, talking about Marc’s cool Oakley laptop bag, his two Nokia devices (an N95 and N800), and his setup for getting things done. It was a geek heavy time, and the Mac(k) recorded three podcasts during our time together. He’ll post them when he gets back from cruising around the harbor (on by-the-way, a yacht party that I was looking forward to attending but sadly had to decline).

Finally, at 6pm, I attended the IBM Executives and Industry Analysts dinner hosted by IBM. There were about 24 of us … 8 or so IBM execs, and the remainder industry analysts. There were numerous stimulating discussions going on. The highlight for me was to meet Geoffrey Bock, who’s been writing and publishing on collaboration in the enterprise since the early 1990s, or maybe even before (I remember it as the “Bock and Marshak” team, although Marshak, eg, David, has since “gone to the dark side” … that being a vendor of all things!). As I said to Geoffrey, it must be fascinating for him to attend events like this and hear ideas being advocated as new-new when he’s been writing about them for 15-20 years. I’m hoping that I’ll get a chance to do a more formal interview with Geoffrey before the show finishes. The last thing that I wanted to say about the IBM dinner — aside from having a wonderful evening and being very well looked after by IBM (thanks Janine and team!) — was that I was struck by the collegiality between the analysts in the room. We all work for competing firms, but the dialogue and the interaction was … very friendly and deeply engaging. I had a great chat with both Melanie Turek (now with Frost & Sullivan) and David Coleman (of Collaborative Strategies fame) … it was just a neat evening.

So … all in all … it has been a super-neat day. I feel so privileged and blessed to be here. And I feel really delighted for Steve Wylie (conference chair) and Andy Saldana from CMP Media and their respective colleagues at how well today has gone … great pre-work and preparation make for a super-excellent conference. Well done everyone!