Yesterday I got back from Ghent after attending Engage. Theo Heselmans and his crew did it again. Everything was well organised in a stunning setting.
For me it was an amazing event, meeting (again) so many people from the ICS Community. Finally there was time to catch up.
Some observations
In the Keynote I have my first live impression of IBM Verse. Nice to see, I think the Personal Assistent functionality based on IBM Watson will be the selling point. The ‘other’ vendors will be far behind in this field.
As a developer I am pleased to see that XPages will be available on IBM Bluemix. Was announced at ConnectED in Orlando, but in Ghent I got a peek on what it will be. Looking forward to get my hands on the actual code.
Especially that IBM has made the deployment process from inside the IBM Designer as easy as it is now in the ‘real’ Eclipse IDE.
Theo has managed to get so many great sponsors for the event. I know already lots of products offered by the vendors, like OnTime, Kudos Badges, Aveedo and LDC Via, but also amazed by Darwino from Trilog Group. I got a very detailed introduction by Philippe Riand, thanks for that.
The openness of IBM is also very refreshing, again. Lots of great IBM-ers, so approachable and open for feedback. A very constructive discussion about Lotusphere 2016.
I attend some great sessions. Finally got the opportunity to attend the Graph Revolution session of Nathan Freeman. Mind blowing concept. But the most mind blowing session was about CrossWorld, Websphere (or any other Java server meets OpenNTF Domino API. I needs time to settle what I saw there. It was so simple concept, for what I saw, but with so much potential. To bad Ask IBM session was at the sometime, because I am very curious what the developers of IBM are thinking about it.
Wrap up
Was good to catch up with all the people. Talked to so much people, saw lots of familiar faces but also very new ones. This year, the first time, I was no speaker. As I was on the waiting list, I have prepared my session slides, see here. Lets go back to XPages development