A Well Dressed (and Jet Lagged) Man

NOTE: This post was written while still in Milan, but published after arriving yesterday early evening in Las Vegas.  British Airways did not provide wifi access on the Milan-to-Vegas flight.

Greetings from the Milan Linate airport.

My short week in Europe has come to a fast end, but not before I had the opportunity to get out and see the Duomo in downtown Milan.

On my last trip here, I arrived in Milan on a Sunday evening, and had to immediately leave the IBM site to drive straight to Nice, so I didn’t have the opportunity to visit the city center.

There’s but no question the Duomo is worth visiting. The church is spectacular, having been built in the early Renaissance and simply breathtaking in its beauty.

As to the food in Milan, it’s like anywhere else I’ve ever been in Italy – scrumptious. The Italians can take a simple plate of penne pasta and turn it into magic in your mouth. Mmm, mmmm, mmmm.

Before dinner last evening, my IBM amigo Michael and I took in a little Milano fashion expedition. After joking about my poor fashion sense in previous blog posts, I decided I couldn’t leave one of the fashion capitals of the world without at least trying on some fine Italian threads.

I ended up walking out of the store with a very nice Italian sport coat and a couple of gorgeous shorts, my wallet hardly the worse for the wear. Austin will never know what hit ’em (although it’ll probably take a funeral or a wedding for me to pull them out of the closet…Austin’s pretty laid back when it comes to dress, even for bidness).

But, before I get to head back to Austin, I have one last stop to make, that mentioned pit stop in Las Vegas. For anyone glorifying the jetsetting lifestyle, know that my Saturday goes something like this:

Arrive at the Milan airport around 11:30 AM local time. Sit in the BA lounge until boarding my flight, which leaves for London around 1:40. Arrive in London a couple of hours later, sit around the airport there for a couple of hours, then board the flight to Vegas which is 10 ½ hours (in economy class, of course).

That means I’ll have arrived in Vegas sometime around 4:30 am Milano time Sunday morning.

But in all my jetlagged weariness, I’ll have some fond memories of meeting some new IBM colleagues in Stuttgart, Madrid, and Milan, and hopefully of my team and I having helped them continue to improve their Web marketing efforts.

More from Vegas and the IBM Pulse 2010 event soon.

Turbo Fa Milano

I arrived safely in Milan last evening, only to discover that Milan Fashion Week 2010 doesn’t begin for another 6 days!

My new line of cowboy-themed tie-die shirts, blue jeans, and cowboy hats seems to have been kept out of this year’s Milano lineup — I can’t be sure what, exactly, happened.

Did I inadvertently tick off Anna Wintour??

Perhaps it had something to do with my having worn a tie that didn’t match the color of my eyes.  It won’t have been the first time I committed a major fashion faux-pas while traveling abroad.

Though I’ll miss out on all the new Milano clothing lines, The Fashionisto blog will make sure you don’t miss a thing, no matter how short your high heels.

While I work to get my Texas fashion sense (such as it is) resituated, I had mentioned in a previous post the opportunities presented to organizations which focus on building out smarter business infrastructures.

This in anticipation of the IBM Pulse 2010 event next week in Las Vegas, which leads to some compelling questions you might want to ask yourself:

What would mean to your organization if you could always access critical business data at the exact moment you need it?

What if you could improve service and reduce costs by delivering IT services when your customers requested them?

Who knows, you might find yourself arriving in Milan for fashion week!

Especially in this challenging economic climate, companies around the globe have to manage and mitigate risk, even as they support their core business goals.

They have to address no small number of regulatory, organizational, and industry-oriented compliance drivers, and that alone can be a key inhibitor.

By way of example, 33% of consumers notified of a security breach will terminate their relationship with the company they perceive as responsible.

Doh!  Hold on, where’d all my customers go?!

71% of CIOs in a 2009 IBM Global CIO survey identified risk management and compliance as an important part of their visionary plans for enhanced competitiveness.

Can you spell Basel II?

And nearly 50% of all sensors used for critical measurements across production, facilities and transportation equipment are now smart sensors, generating up to 4 million signals daily — creating more information than ever before.

So many sensors, so little time!  Calgon, take me away!

Fear not.

Though it can’t help you with your fashion sense, IBM’s dynamic infrastructure strategy can help you deliver a shared, integrated and highly available infrastructure that can address these challenges today, but also capitalize on the opportunities of tomorrow.

It can help across a number of key areas:

• To enable visibility, control and automation across all business and IT assets through integrated service management
• To optimize the IT infrastructure through virtualization and energy efficiency initiatives to achieve more with less.
• To address the complexity of managing data growth through information infrastructure initiatives.

You can learn more about these opportunities in IBM Tivoli’s integrated service management podcasts and webcasts.

I would also suggest you visit our Smarter Cities Web experience, an excellent interactive overview of how IBM is helping drive adoption of smart and dynamic  infrastructures to facilitate everything from smarter traffic systems to smarter and more efficient energy grids. (Speaking of which, click hear to visit the IBM Energy Management blog!)

Me, I’ve got to manage my own energy and get back to this meeting in Milano…keep your fingers crossed for the Italian adoption of the Turbo Cowboy fashion line!