Day two is almost over but for the shouting, er, the xTravaganza. More about that later.
After yesterday’s focus on Serena’s vision and roadmap, today was all about our customers. We started off early this morning with 400 people assembled in general session, today’s consisting of an often inspiring set of presentations, including the Serena Innovation Awards, the now traditional Fact or Fiction customer panel and the new Serena Charity Challenge winner.
Serena founder Doug Troxel skyped in for the Innovation Awards ceremony, while they were handed out by Doug Serena, CIO. The Douggie for Orchestrated Apps went to Katherine Chu of Navy Federal Credit Union, while the Douggie for Orchestrated Ops went to Peter Rizzo of Interactive Data Corporation and the Douggie for Orchestrated IT went to Matt Stratton of Apartments.com.
I then had some fun with three Fact or Fiction panelists: Craig Kaley of LenderLive, Paula Callis of Shelter Insurance, and Justin Arnoldi of Blue Turtle. They gamely passed judgement on a series of provocative statements, providing interesting commentary about each.
We ended the morning on a truly uplifting note, as we awarded the Oregon Humane Society with a check for $5,000 AND a new surgery scheduling system built in Serena Business Manager. This was the result of the Serena Charity Challenge, “won” by Robin Drummond of Kaiser Permanente, who nominated the Oregon Humane Society and built the app. Serena’s contribution is the $5K check and freely providing access from the cloud for them to use their new system. Almost as sweet as a new puppy!
After an afternoon of great breakouts and a great talk by Matt Stratton about the DevOps accomplishments at Apartments.com, we’re now assembling at the House of Blues for the 2012 xTravaganza!
Great day!
