Wow. Terrific first morning for xChange, our Global User Conference. After a layoff of some three years, it would have been reasonable for attendance to have been sparse, or customers to be confused.
Instead we had well over 300 people packing a large room at the brand new MGM Grand convention center in Las Vegas. Customers came from all over Europe, Latin America, Asia and North America.
The day began in beautiful fashion, with the four beauties of Bella Electric strings playing beautiful concertos while attired in long black concert dresses. xChange Maestro Kevin Parker then orchestrated the assembled throng into humming the five note theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This summoned Bella Electric back on stage, this time in their Vegas outfits and playing their hot set. Michael Jackson, Journey and even Led Zeppelin sound great when performed by four electric string musicians.
John Nugent, Serena’s President and CEO, then described a powerful vision for Orchestrated IT, talking in detail about several Serena customers who are already reaping the benefits.
Then some fun: a skit entitled “Doug Serena, CIO.” This day in the life production used a case study of modern IT challenges and showed how Serena’s ability to orchestrate application delivery and IT operations can go a long way to solving them. (Hint: I played Doug Serena. So now I can say that while I’m not a real CIO, I once played one in front of almost 1,000 people, the total who were in the room and watching the live webcast.)
All of the above came in the first 90 minutes! After the break, we delved into the substance of our vision and roadmaps for dev and ops, and took time to invite a couple of customers on stage.
Great morning. More later…
