Bladewatch.com

The British Airways Face–to–Face program is helping small businesses across America grow their organization by making connections and forming partnerships around the world. Last year, we awarded more than six hundred entrepreneurs with flights to London and beyond, enabling them to meet prospective clients and vendors, attend conferences, arrange partnerships and seal the deals in person. This year, British Airways continues to support small businesses with the Face of Opportunity contest. Over 250 companies will win a free flight to anywhere British Airways flies as well as exclusive access to events with some of the best and brightest minds in business. Watch the top 10 finalists as they make a pitch for a face-to-face meeting. The top three contestants, as determined by your votes, will be invited to present their pitches to a celebrity panel at our exclusive networking conference. The winner will receive airfare for 10 free business flights.

I flew with British Airways to the HP Bloggers event and one of the promotional videos they had on the in flight entertainment was about their Face-to-Face project, I love the concept. Maybe I could be accused of being old school, but even with video conferencing, with voice, chat, and with collaborative tools, there remains the issue that although they are all invaluable communication tools, but meeting face-to-face remains an effective way of breaking barriers, articulating your message, and resolving  issues, real or perceived. The videos were interesting, and the site has some good content regarding businesses that have benefited from the face of opportunity scheme. Do check it out.

So with no prior thought or planning, my face-to-face pitch would be to fly over and meet some vendors to discuss their products and services, their usp, what they’re bringing to the end user community. To better inform us and our readers as to what we could be missing not understanding, or failing to discuss so with that in mind, I would meet:

• IBM – let us talk iDataplex and how you see the converged infrastructure space
• Dell – the Cloud servers and what range of innovations they continue to bring the converged infrastructure and cloud space.
• HP – Performance Optimized data centers, the Scale out range of servers (SL) and how they see converged infrastructure innovating the possibilities
• Hardcore computing – how their unique blade technology might not only create opportunities for scaling out the data center for the cloud generation, but give me the  headroom I need to prepare my existing data center and IT space for the next generation infrastructure
• Cisco – how Cisco’s UCS is empowering infrastructure transformation, virtualization and preparation for the cloud space.
• Cirascale – how the changes within their organization with the improvements and re-alignment of their products can empower user opportunity and deploy cloud solutions
• Platform – how platform is responding to the needs of the ever changing enterprise, and providing the agility it needs to deliver transformation
• Tibco – talk about the expansion of grid and the cloud, the move to GridServer 6.0 and Tibco Silver, and how they are preparing for cloud both internal and external.
• VMware – how they see cloud transforming the marketplace, how VMware can continue to innovate their products and empower the end user to manage their remote virtual instances, managing capacity, agility and reporting.
• Citrix about application and server virtualization, streaming applications down the wire, how that creates opportunities across markets, across enterprises and devices – what that means for the cloud in terms of private and application data, on demand provisioning and right scoping end user requirements
• Universities, like Stanford, MIT, Caltch and the University of California,amongst others to ask – so how are you empowering your students, (young and old) to be ready for the next generation of the IT landscape, what innovations in teaching, in content and experience or preparation are you looking at? Can we change the IT course to be both academic, conceptual and of empowerment both technically, operationally and individually?

These are just a few of the vendors thinking out loud that I would speak too. Not only to discuss what they can offer our readers, my colleagues and the user community, but to offer end user feedback, the big issues and the small, with the recognition, that of course IT needs innovation and progress, that we need to continue moving with the times, though that it can be those nuts and bolts issues, those little things that hinder adoption and successful transformation with these tools. The more the vendors understand, the more we communicate, the more we can individually and as a community deploy the right range of technologies for me, for my business and my end user community….

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