IBM ImpactTV 2012 Instant Replay: Bob Sutor On Tackling The Massive Mobile Enterprise Opportunity

Recently at IBM Impact in Las Vegas, Scott Laningham and I had the opportunity to sit down with a wide variety of great speakers, including our senior VPs Steve Mills and Mike Rhodin, whose instant replays I’ve already shared.

Most of those folks, we gave about ten minutes.  But there’s been such immense interest in the enterprise mobile topic, that when we sat down with IBM’s VP of WebSphere Foundation and IBM Mobile, Bob Sutor, we spoke for a good 18 minutes.

That’s not only because Bob was a scintillating and thoughtful guest, which he always is, but because there’s a lot to talk about in the mobile space.

So much of the oxygen recently has been around Facebook’s valuation and the rise of BYOD…but there are much more practical and necessary concerns that organizations need to think about as they start to build out their mobile strategies.

Things like application lifecycle development, cross-platform development, and that bugaboo that always rears its head in the mobile conversation, security and privacy.

Bob takes them all on and more in the far-ranging interview below:

IBM ImpactTV 2012 Instant Replay: IBM’s Mike Rhodin On Big Data, Smarter Commerce, And The Emerging LOB Tech Buyer

Our first interview at IBM Impact 2012 this year was with IBM senior vice president, IBM Software Solutions Group, Mike Rhodin.  This was also our first ever opportunity to interview Mike, so we were especially excited about this particular interview.

Mike leads an organization which focuses on delivering integrated offerings that target high-growth opportunities, including business analytics, collaboration, and industry solutions.  As a senior vice president, Mike is responsible for a $5 billion business portfolio which represents one of the fastest growing and most acquisitive.

In our interview, Mike explained that his business is reaching more of a non-traditional technology buyer, the senior “line of business” executives who have played a much more dominant role in tech acquisition through the economic downturn, and who are looking for solutions that can help their organizations differentiate themselves in the marketplace, and and even more readily empower front-line executives and decision makers.

He also brought us up to date on what IBM’s Watson has been up to over the past year, explaining that Watson finally got a “real” job — actually, a couple of them!

In his former IBM lives, Mike has served as the general manager of IBM’s Northeast Europe organization, as well as the GM of IBM’s Lotus Software division, a stint in which he led a team to create the “human side” of IBM’s software strategy by developing IBM’s collaborative technology and solutions which integrate people, data, and business processes.

IBM ImpactTV 2012 Instant Replay: IBM’s Steve Mills On Big Data Analytics, PureSystems, And The Continued Importance Of Transaction Processing

At last week’s IBM Impact 2012 event at the Venetian in Las Vegas, my collaborator and fellow blogger Scott Laningham and I spent much of our week interviewing thought leaders from IBM, our Business Partners, our clients, and even our keynoters, and to help spread the word, we’ll be incorporating some of those interviews in our respective blogs over the next days and weeks.

First up, the big man himself, IBM senior vice president and group executive, Software and Systems, Steve Mills.

If you’ve been in or around the software or IT industry for any length of time, it’s very likely you’ve heard from Steve.  And, as you well know, Steve always delivers — to customers, and to audiences.

This time around, Steve reminded us about the importance of transaction processing, explained the economic drivers that led to the development of IBM’s new PureSystems line of technology, and debriefed us on two recent IBM Software acquisitions in the big data analytics realm.

Impact 2012: Steve Mills On How Transaction Processing Rules

Transaction processing.

Transactions aren’t sexy.  They’re not cool.  You don’t get points for racking them up. You can’t put them on your bookshelf and show them off.

IBM senior vice president, software and systems, Steve Mills warns the Impact 2012 audience “Nothing will get you in more trouble than if there’s a problem with your critical transactions.”

But all of that doesn’t matter, because transactions run the world — and, therefore, they rule.

They rule banking.  They rule retail operations.  They rule medical systems.  Transactions are everything.

And transactions are us.

That seemed to be the key message behind IBM senior vice president Steve Mills’ message to the gathered Impact 2012 audience for the day 2 general session.

Mills actually keynoted second, but I wanted to deliver his message first, because it’s a critically important one: IBM is thriving in an era of ubiquitous transactions, Mills explained.  “We’ve been investing in transactions for as long as there was programmable computing.  How do you do effective transaction processing?  How do you have true control over a unit of work, and do that at scale, especially in a world of increasingly bigger data?”

That’s where IBM Software lives and breathes.  Mills mentioned a typical panoply of daily transaction sizes: 9.9 billion proximity mobile transactions by 2016, 18.7 million web transactions last Cyber Monday, 864 million payment card transactions per day, 1 million transactions per second in the Amazon cloud.

Again, transactions make the world go ‘round — until they don’t.

Transactions are like oxygen — you don’t notice them until they go wrong, and then you do notice, bigtime. IBM’s role has been to not only to make sure you don’t notice, but to increasingly evolve our technology so that the systems stack works both horizontally and vertically, enabling your business partners and others to enter your transaction ecosystem.

“Nothing will get you in more trouble,” explained Mills, “than if there’s a problem with those critical transactions.”

Of course, we’re in Vegas, so I can think of a few things, but his point remains well taken.

“Millions of transactions go through IBM mainframes a day, fundamental financial activity using CICS and MQ…these are responsibilities we take very seriously,” Mills continued.

The proof’s always in the pudding, so Mills related some key customer stories: Marriott, whose reservation booking engine does 1,500 transactions per second.

Or China Mobile, operating at a scale many businesses couldn’t even fathom: 600 million customers, 148 million transactions per day — and by implementing an IBM service-oriented architecture they’ve reduced their new application go-to-market time by 50 percent!

Now, let’s flashback to our first speaker, Johan Gerber, head of processing products at MasterCard, who was introduced by the spirited Katie Linendoll, CBS Early Morning show’s “Chic Geek,” making her much welcomed return engagement to Impact.

“We needed this platform so we could innovate,” payments processing lead for MasterCard Johan Gerber summarizes for the Impact 2012 audience in this morning's opening general session. “Innovation is what provides differentiation. To stay ahead of the competition is key.”

MasterCard was more proof in the pudding, with a company that supports more than 32 million merchants and an average of 43,000 transactions every minute, each lasting a mind-boggling 130 milliseconds.

Can you say lightning fast transactions?!!

MasterCard’s business is transactions, and Gerber explained the MasterCard network can handle about 14 billion instructions per second, and has multiple layers of protection and redundancy.

“The last thing we can afford,” Gerber explained “is for that network to go down.

“And,” he quipped. “Not even Lady Gaga has this much security.”

Being the world’s most advanced payments technology, MasterCard has been investing in IBM WebSphere technology to help them continue to innovate, and Gerber explained they “needed a technology partner they could trust.”

Trust being an explicit conditions for most successful transactions, in the network or otherwise.

MasterCard launched their new transaction platform in February of this year and have already moved two key applications there, and were able to do so in hours, instead of weeks.

“We needed this platform so we could innovate,” Gerber summarized. “Innovation is what provides differentiation. To stay ahead of the competition is key.”

There are some things money can’t buy.  For everything else there’s MasterCard…and its whopping 43,000 transactions per minute.

Forbes Business Leadership Forum @ Impact 2012: Put The Customer At The Center Of Every Action

Mike Rhodin explains to the IBM Forbes Business Leadership Forum at Impact 2012 Monday morning that the best companies moving forward will put the customer at the center of their every action.

After this morning’s keynote session, I went promptly over to the Forbes Business Leadership Forum to listen for a bit to Mike Perlis, Forbes president and CEO, and Mike Rhodin, IBM’s senior vice president for our Software Solutions group.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I’m a Forbes magazine subscriber — and apparently I’m hardly alone, even in this alleged age of digital media and publishing. In fact, Perlis took great pains to walk the gathered IBM Impact audience through the evolution of Forbes magazine and its transition into the digital era, as a kind of case study into how one unique traditional media publishing property didn’t succumb to the whims of history.

Perlis outlined some key objectives for Forbes, including keeping its print business on track as it built its digital business, and also by developing its brand extensions and becoming a great technology company.

These days, Forbes has some 100 freelancers, 100 staff editors and reporters, and over 300 posts per day on Forbes.com, the centerpiece of Forbes digital strategy.

But Forbes has also embraced the social media in a huge way, with an aggressive presence on all the major social media properties, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

As Perlis summarized, “it’s about the right mix of quality and quantity of information, driven by great technology.”

Perlis then handed the reins over to IBM senior vice president, Mike Rhodin, who leads our Software Solutions business.

Rhodin picked up the ball and reaffirmed that Forbes business journey was an evolution, and that we live in an “information age like none before, where the complexities are forcing us to take a new approach to technology.”

Rhodin noted that companies like Forbes that successfully navigate these uncharted waters must “deploy solutions that are intelligent, integrated by design, and built atop a tech infrastructure that is inherently more cognitive.”

Rhodin went on to cite some examples of the staggering amounts of data that must be dealt with: That there are 340 million Tweets now per day, that 80% of the new data growth are in images, videos and documents, that there are 5 million trading events occurring every second!

Such astronomical figures are creating some tough new challenges, not only for IT but for the mainstream of a business.  Forty-five percent of CFOs see a need to improve data integration and risk management, Rhodin explained, and 73 percent of CMOs see a need to invest in technology to manage new big data.

Business leaders aren’t just concerned with what product to buy, Rhodin explained, but are focused on garnering better business outcomes, how to improve the efficiency of their online marketing campaigns, how to improve cash flows…business problems needing business solutions enabled by technology.

Rhodin also explained that business leaders need to learn to think differently (a theme brought up time and again in Walter Isaacson’s keynote this morning) about analytics, explaining that a new pattern of automation is emerging that is being driven by the instrumentation of the world around us.

“We’re infusing intelligence into the fabric of the organization,” Rhodin continued, and that organizational leaders of the future will be distinguished by their “ability to make big and small, strategic and tactical, 360 degree-informed decisions.”

“This has become a 24/7 feedback loop where sellers and marketers constantly change roles,” Rhodin concluded, and those who put the consumer at the center of every action would be the new information age’s ultimate victors.

Walter Isaacson: The Stuff Of Great Innovators

Former CNN head and noted biographer Walter Isaacson captured my attention from the moment he walked on the IBM Impact 2012 stage and announced his next book would be a history of the computer age.

Walter Isaacson takes the stage at IBM Impact 2012’s opening general session, where he explained to the Impact audience what he believes are common characteristics shared by some of our greatest innovators.

Then, Isaacson launched into an explanation of what attributes great innovators shared throughout history — Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs.

Though Isaacson’s keynote at times seemed like an uncoordinated symphony, the words of wisdom and insight, and keen observations into the lives of his subjects, made his talk both compelling and inspirational.

Isaacson paid homage in his opening comments to IBM’s 100-year history of innovation and contributions to the information age, but it was his most recent biographical subject, Steve Jobs, that he let serve as the channel behind  the magic of an unwavering and driven innovator.

“Don’t be afraid,” Isaacson said in describing Jobs at his persuasive best. “You can do it.”

Whatever it might be really depended on the situation and circumstance — once, it was Jobs convincing Steve Wozniak to write some game code in four days.  Another time, it was convincing Corning CEO Wendell Weeks that he could manufacture his “guerrilla glass — which, at that point, had never actually been manufactured — in time to support the first iPhones.

Jobs, of course, was an exemplar of the great American creation myth, but behind the mythology there were lots of life lessons learned, particularly in childhood, another universal Isaacson observed about his innovators.

“The most important thing is not making a great product,” Jobs explained to Isaacson in one of his nearly 40 interviews, “but rather a company that will continue to make great products.”

Jobs and Wozniak started their empire in their parents’ garage, and went on to change the world and, over the course of his life, Jobs’ changed multiple industries: personal computing, the music business, digital animation…the list goes on.

Childhood curiosities, Isaacson observed, shared by Franklin and Einstein.

That was another unique characteristic that they all shared: The curiousity and persistence to try and solve problems and look for new ways of thinking up until their last breaths.

Smart people are generally a dime a dozen, explained Isaacson, but the innovative people, the imaginative people — they’re the ones who change the world.

But they also shared an ability to quickly get to the heart of the problem, and to encourage others to find their way to simplicity.

Isaacson quotes Einstein this time, but he just as well could have once again been referring to Steve Jobs:

“Any damned fool can make something complicated…it takes a genius to make it simple.”

Perfect case in point, the “on/off” switch for the iPod, which was in one of the original early designs, but which Jobs pointed out was unnecessary when he reviewed a prototype with his designers.

“You don’t need an on/off switch,” he explained. “When you quit using the iPod it just powers down.”

And so it was.

Isaacson shared another revealing anecdote, this time about Benjamin Franklin’s participation in the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and, later, the collaboration on the drafting of the U.S. Constitution.

The original Declaration read: “We hold these truths to be sacred,” but Franklin, sensitive to the divine implications of such a phrase, and sensitive to the need for church/state clarity, suggested a re-wording: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

And so it was.

Yet years later, benefiting both from experience and having developed a sense of humility along the way, Franklin was more accommodating and facilitated a critical discussion centering on the inequities of power between the big states and little states in the nascent U.S. Union.

His urging to compromise led to the genius that became the U.S. House and Senate, where one body was proportional to the population, and the other was equitable regardless of state size. When a lady later asked him what he had “given them,” Franklin explained “A Republic, madam…if you can keep it.”

Yet despite all of their incredible accomplishments and breakthrough innovations, each of these giant men were, in the end, just that, men, people, humans — filled with the same kind of self-doubts and wonderment at the universe as all the rest of us.

Isaacson reminded us when Jobs returned to the helm of Apple in 1997 that he green-lighted a new ad campaign from Chiat/Day that celebrated the spirt of the great innovators. The slogan went like this:

“People who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

He was.  And he did.  Einstein was.  And he did.  Franklin was, and he did.

Each in their own unique way, but with underneath each a connecting thread of a drive towards perfection, an insatiable amount of unsated curiosity, and always looking for a way forward.

Isaacson closed his talk with a beautiful and reminiscent story of Jobs, who knew he was nearing his last days on earth.  He asked Jobs, with all his Zen Buddhism training, what he felt spiritually, and did he feel there was something larger in this world than the moments we spend on this spinning globe?

Jobs explained that he liked to think so, that our spirits live on, and all that accumulated spiritual wisdom somehow benefits us moving forward.

But then, after a pause, he explained that at other times, he felt that death is just like one of those on-off switches.

Like the ones he didn’t want included on the iPod.

BLOGGER’S NOTE: I had occasion to interview Walter Isaacson on the key themes behind his keynote just after he was finished speaking. Among other things, I questioned him about his early work in digital media at Time’s Pathfinder group in 1994-1995, the impact of the Internet on the global economy, his work with the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe on the Broadcasting Board of Governors, and his perspective on the renaissance New Orleans is currently enjoying.  Stay tuned to the Turbo blog for more on this far-ranging and compelling Q&A. 

AIMing For An Immense Market Opportunity

I made it to my first session at IBM Impact 2012 earlier this afternoon here at the Venetian Hotel and Casino in Viva Las Vegas.

The session was a stage setter for the rest of the event, and I just HAD to share what I learned with the rest of the world.

At IBM Impact 2012 today, IBM market advisor Rahul Sahni provided a comprehensive overview of the application and middleware (AIM) market. Here, Sahni highlighted a few key macro-economic factors that are affecting the IT market.

Rahul Sahni, a market development advisor with IBM’s AIM and ICS organizations, shared a market view for the Application and Middleware Infrastructure market, which we know is changing underneath our feet.

Rahul’s presentation was excellent, hitting the highlights of both what is shaping the market, and what’s driving some substantial changes in it.

The Economic Shakeout

He set up his presentation with some macroeconomic data: Japan still coming out of recession, Europe still a wildcard with obvious volatility in the south, the US/Canada holding steady in the 3-4% GDP growth range, and the BRIC’s coming in for a gentle landing, some more softly than others.

There are some potential threats to business growth: In the developing markets, the currency devaluations.  In the mature markets, the sovereign debt crises.  And yet despite all this volatility, the storage and software infrastructure markets remain strong.

Mr. or Mrs. CIO, Can You Spare A Project?

Why?  CIO plans require strong IT infrastructures. If you look at where IT execs are spending, the sweet spots include AIM middleware, where often one or several IT projects will include parts of the AIM middleware portfolio.

Becoming Agile For The Upturn

Of those, projects required Agile/OOD systems, process simplification, industry and/or government compliance, cost reduction mandates, the amount and availability of data, and finally, workforce mobility and productivity are the top six drivers. Ergo, the AIM market is expected to grow some 6% in 2012, and will grow to an estimated $1 billion opportunity in 2013.

Economic conditions are such that key projects have resulted in more demand for small IT initiatives with short term ROI and a need for greater productivity and efficiencies.  Pie-in-the-sky projects with long-term prospects for growth have been mostly sidelined.  Show me the money, and show it to me soon (meaning, the value that will be returned against the project).

The AIM Market Is Growing…and Changing

Of the three AIM market segments, there’s Application Infrastructure (growing at 8%), Business Process Managment (11%), and Connectivity and Integration (2%).  In the first, key growth drivers are the enterprise need to provide transparency, reduce costs, and stay competitive.

For BPM, cloud adoption is now a key driver in BPM as smaller and medium-sized businesses’ processes become more complex and as BPM cloud solutions become more price-aggressive.

For Connectivity and Integration, on-premise integration can now be matched by cloud services in functionality and also aggressive pricing.

So, writ large, the AIM market is growing today because its products can help simplify IT complexity, and help organizations better understand, improve, and make more transparent their business processes.

Organizations also need to make the best use of what they already have in the way of IT investments, and AIM products provide the ability to integrate existing applications, infrastructure, and processes with new development initiatives.  This becomes especially critical as we see continued activity in mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures.  All to applications, infrastructures and processes have to be integrated somehow.

This Is Not Your Father’s Application And Integration Market

So what about some of these new arenas?  Mobile platforms will most definitely continue to grow and evolve, with market data suggesting that enterprise investment in mobile application development will increase at the rate of 20-30 percent per annum in order to meet the rising demand for customer applications.

Customer facing industries rank highest with need to develop mobile enterprises, with virtual guns being held to their heads as they compete for customer-centricity in a growing but younger customer base.

Application Convergence Will Rule The IT World

Also noteworthy, over the next few years, the lines between the Web, hybrid and native apps will blur and mobile enterprise application platforms (MEAPs), portals, other web development approaches will converge into a new generation multichannel application development tool. Those organizations unprepared for this transition may soon find themselves on Application Island with no place to row back to.

Become Your Cloud: The Great Mobile Gold Landrush of 2012

It goes without saying that the cloud is inherently critical to this new environment.  Cloud based development is lowering the cost of adoption and increasing the speed with which companies can roll out mobile solutions, and a significant portion of the IT opportunity associated with mobile enterprise initiatives will come not from the purchase of devices and network services — the bright and shiny objects that all your friends and family get so googly-eyed about — but from the associated software, consulting, system integration and security services.

The Future’s So Bright…

I’ll call it “the Great Mobile Gold Rush of 2012” — remember, we’re laying the tracks for a new foundation of computing. The excitement may be in the devices, but a little sleight of hand reveals the ridiculously gargantuan opportunity in the virtual picks and shovels required to make it all work.

To which point Rahul began to close his session, reassuring the business partners in attendance and beyond that this is a market IBM is committed to.  WebSphere still makes up a substantial share of IBM Software revenues, and IBM’s 2015 roadmap reveals that 50% of segment profit is expected to come from IBM Software. (And no, we’re not feeling any pressure over here or anything!)

IBM’s four key growth initiatives against that 2015 roadmap reveal two obvious intersects with the AIM market, our growth markets, where much of the middleware layer is being laid for those future railroad tracks, and cloud computing, to which IBM has made massive investments in growth, organic and acquisition, over the past several years.

Throw in a little business analytics technology to help you understand your AIM infrastructure performance, and there’s plenty of upside in the AIM.

My takeaway: The AIM future’s so bright you gotta wear some of those Google augmented reality glasses, but if you can’t see your way through evolving with the convergence of the mobile enterprise and the cloud you’ll have few business processes left to worry about managing!

Five Things You Need To See At Impact 2012

It’s Sunday morning here at Impact 2012, and the IBM Impact Business Partner Summit has already begun.

If you’re not there, and you were supposed to be there, that probably means you overslept and that you’d better hurry up and shower and get down there.

For those of you who are not attending the Impact Business Partner Summit, I have just one question for: Well why not?!… Seriously, if not, that you means you’ve got almost a whole Sunday to yourself in Vegas.

However, as I mentioned in my post yesterday, it’s always good to have some structure in life and at conferences. So, if you don’t have any structure, I’m going to attempt to provide you some in this, “The 5 Things You Need To See At IBM Impact,” overview post. Listen carefully…

Number one, you need to see all the IBM Impact general sessions, mini main tents, and as many of the breakout sessions and hands-on labs as you possibly can.  You’ll learn a lot there, and it’ll keep you off the Las Vegas Strip, where nothing good can ever happen to you.  Trust me on this.

Solutions For Everyone At The IBM Impact Solution Center

Second, you also need to stop by the IBM Impact Solution Center (the Expo!), where you can spend time playing nice on the Impact Social Playground with all the other boys and girls (more on that in a moment). There’s also the IBM product technology center.

Remember, the conference mantra this year is to “Change the game,” but how in the world are you going to change it if you’re not even in it!??

In the Solution Center, you will find a hub of activity for more than 9,000 expected attendees, and this is where Scott Laningham and I will be spending much of our time on the ImpactTV stage.

This year’s IBM Impact Solution Center will feature the latest technology and cutting-edge solutions offered by IBM and IBM Business Partners. Please take advantage of this opportunity to network, collaborate, and view live demonstrations… even if the demo you’re watching freezes, you’ll learn something!

Playing On The Impact Social Playground

On the Impact Social Playground, you’ll find an exciting social club that will bring together all the social movers and shakers. I’m not one of them, but join us nonetheless and I’ll pretend to move and shake.  The Impact Social Playground is located in the Impact Solution Center and will provide enhanced social networking facilities for all attendees, business partners, Tweeters,  bloggers, analysts and media.

There will also be 2 private recording pods, for those very personal interviews, and a 12 seat recharger bar station seating for networking and catching up on your social activities, and recharging your batteries (yours and your electronic devices). It’s a great place, in other words, to hang out. In fact, I was hanging out there just last night (I told you, it’s better to stay away from the Strip, and that includes me!)

Of course, if you’re ready to leverage technologies that will fundamentally reshape our future and change the way organizations operate, as well as increase human capability, you should check out the Forbes Business Leadership Forum tomorrow and Tuesday.

There, you will find unmatched resources and practical solutions on how to innovate transform and grow your business, including feedback from clients who have successfully leveraged technology to not just reduce costs and improve efficiencies, but also to fundamentally transform the way they do business. When’s the last time you did that?!

The Impact Unconference

And finally, for you developers out there, day 3 will be “Developer Day” and the IBM Impact Unconference. Developer Day will start with an inspiring general session, “Freedom to Achieve Your Application Potential,” which will be followed by a mini main tent session featuring technology comedian Don McMillan who will present on “The New Development Reality.”  You’ll also hear from IBM Fellow Grady Booch, and talks on mobile, cloud computing, and…well, you’ll just have to show up to find out the rest.

Later in the afternoon on Wednesday, the “Unconference,” sponsored by IEEE and the Global WebSphere community, will give developers the opportunity to set the agenda by voting on the ideas they want to hear and presenting topics they want to discuss. It’s the ultimate in crowd sourced content!

So, keep your eye on #IBMImpact via Twitter, and here on the Turbo blog for full coverage of IBM Impact 2012.

Fear And Loathing At The Venetian

Well, I arrived in Vegas this morning just as quick as I could get here, my purpose being to cover the National District Attorneys Association’s Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs…oh, hold a minute…sorry, that was Hunter S. Thompson.

I’M here for the IBM Impact 2012 event being held at the Venetian Hotel and Casino (which is NOT to be confused with the Venice that’s located in Italy and which is slowly succumbing to the seas around it).  No, this Venetian doesn’t have that particular problem to worry about.

The next four to five days, depending on the length of your stay and the size of your bank account, is going to be entirely dedicated to technology-related topics: SOA, BPM, cloud computing, enterprise mobility…it’s a virtual technology funfest.

Oh, and let’s not forget the Goo Goo Dolls, who will be playing Tuesday night.

A few housekeeping details you might want to be cognizant of: First, check your bathroom for Bengali Tigers FIRST THING.

Look, you can never be too careful, particularly in the wilds of Las Vegas.

Second, go get your badge at registration.  Unlike “Blazing Saddles,” at Impact 2012, you’re going to need your stinkin’ badge. You can find them on Level One of the Venetian Convention area.

Third, plan your escape route NOW in the private confines of your hotel room.  Err, I meant to say, your conference itinerary.  I know, I know, most battle plans go out the window the moment you hit the battlefield, but it’s nice to have some general semblance of where you are and where you’re going to go next, even if it’s just a strawman.

Fourth, make room for serendipity.  No, that’s not the name of a dancer from Cirques Du Soleil.  That’s more along the lines of improvisation — as in, give yourself room for some. You never know who you meet just hanging around the canals of Venetian (but hey, don’t blame me if you fall in with the wrong crowd!  I told you to have  a plan, just in case!)

This year’s conference theme is “Change the Game: Innovate, Transform, Grow.”  So, what are you waiting for?  Get to it!

As for me, I’m going to finish writing up some interview questions for ImpactTV (which starts tomorrow at 5 PM PST, 8 PM EST — check it out at www.livestream.com/ibmsoftware), then I’m going to head on down to the Pai Gow Poker tables.  I’m feeling lucky!

If you’re feeling lost, or even unlucky, just follow the #IBMImpact hashtag on Twitter — you’re sure to find plenty of others who are feeling just like you.

And if you have a question for the event organizers, send that question on Twitter to the #AskImpact Twitter ID and surely someone will get you an answer and soon…ahem, it may not be the RIGHT answer, but social media operators ARE standing by.

And most importantly, smile and enjoy yourself…you’re in Vegas, bay-bey, NOTHING could go wrong now!

Having Impact

It’s the end of a long Friday, and you’re sitting there thinking to yourself, “Hmm, what in the world am I going to be doing starting on Sunday, April 29th?!!”

I’m from headquarters and I’m here to help.

If you’re a business or technology leader trying to understand and keep up with the insane amount of change going on in our industry, my recommendation is you hop on a plane and head out to attend the IBM Impact 2012 Global Conference from April 29-May 4.

No, it’s NOT “The Hangover,” thank goodness — neither part one nor part deux — but what it IS is an opportunity to mix it up with your peers and to hear from some of our industry’s key thought leaders.

Let’s start with the keynotes: Author of the acclaimed Steve Jobs biography entitled Steve Jobs, as well as president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, Walter Isaacson, will be a featured speaker this year. Isaacson is a former correspondent and new media editor of Time magazine, who went on to serve as chairman and CEO of CNN from 2001-2003.

“Chic Geek” and 2011 audience favorite Katie Linendoll will also be making a return engagement to Impact. Katie is going to be leading the day 2 general session, as well as moderating a “Women’s Panel” later that Tuesday afternoon (May 1).

And if you’ve never heard from Jane McGonigal, creative director of Social Chocolate and a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games…well, prepare to have your mind blown. I’ve heard Jane at a couple of SXSW Interactives, and Jane’s view of the world is one you’ll want to look into.  She’s also the author of the New York Times bestseller, Reality is Broken.

And those are just the guest speakers.  You’ll also hear from a powerhouse cadre of IBM experts and executives, starting with senior veep Steve Mills. Also in attendance: Rod Smith, our VP emerging technologies…Marie Wieck, GM of the AIM organization…Bridget van Kralingen, senior veep of IBM Global Business Services…Jerry Cuomo, IBM Fellow and WebSphere veep…and a host of others.

But let’s not forget one of the most important aspects of Impact: The networking prowess of 9,000 tech and business leaders all under the same roof.  You can get started in the conversation well ahead of the event by following and contributing to the Impact Social Media Aggregator, and onsite, by visiting the “Impact Social Playground,” a new social hub that will provide enhanced social networking facilities for all attendees, Tweeps, bloggers, analysts, media, and Business Partners.

If you just want to follow along on Twitter, make sure you’re using the #IBMImpact hash tag.

developerWorks blogger and podcaster extraordinaire, Scott Laningham, will also be in attendance, along with yours truly, where we will be conducting live and recorded interviews throughout the event for “ImpactTV.”  So far, we have a committed lineup of the best and brightest…and then there’s Scott and I!

Here’s the link where it all starts for Impact 2012.

I, for one, can’t wait.  Last year was my first Impact, and I had more fun and talked to more cool people than a person has a right to.  And I learned more than I could keep in my head…but of course, that’s not saying much.

And iffen your boss is giving you a hard time about taking time out of your hectic schedule, we’ve even got that covered with our “5 Reasons to Attend Impact 2012.”

I hope to see you there, and if you can’t make it live and in person, be sure to keep an eye on ImpactTV from April 29 through May 4.

Oh yeah, did I forget to mention that the Goo Goo Dolls are playing???