Over at Seric Towers we are all rather excited by the fact that we are to be a technology sponsor for Edinburgh International Film Festival. As a long time film fan I'm personally delighted and looking forward to doing a good job working with all the other partners and sponsors engaged to make the event go with a bang.
At times reduced to a Barcode...
Stuart McRae a Collaboration Evangelist - Connections plus with special sauce
John Schumacher a Director of Development at Lotus - It's the ROI stupid
and
Eliza Manningham-Buller, from the Bond movies - on being in MI5
So there was a lot to see...
Stuart's demo showcased a load of little 10second savers (widgets) being used in concert and in context within Lotus Connections and Domino (yes you could have used outlook for this bit). Widget shown were either Business Partner e.g. Snapp, Big publically available stuff like linkedin and TrippIt and some internal IBM tools, or publically available stuff from the IBM Lotus Labs.
If you can save people 5mins every day through smarter working. That is about 1% of a working day. So with hundred staff you can have 100 staff doing the work of 101. With a 1000 staff you are getting the work of 1010. So for a 1000 employee business you save 10 average salaries... Think about you average company salary for a moment.... think you should be considering this stuff? I do.
For a £20k average salary
1000 staff equates to savings of £200k p.a.
For a £40k average salary
500 staff equates to savings of £200k p.a.
or
1000 staff equates to savings of £400k p.a.
Powerful stuff ... but who believes the 5mins right? Well Stuart showed one example after another of how time could be saved.... if you couldn't easily find AT LEAST 5mins you are probably doing something mad.
Stuart McRae also touched on some of the stuff I've mentioned already about Blackberry and the iPhone but it was cool to see some iPad announces too and to hear reinforced that IBM's view is - you choose the device and we'll work with anyone. Some really cool announces on how people are working well with Alloy by IBM & SAP (wee blog on that), Connections, Quickr and the rest on the Blackberry.
Amongst other things I was reminded by a colleague to check out Ed Brill's blog - where I hadn't been for a while, which led me to some Lotus Protector articles. Zero false positives at 99% effective... not bad and ICSALabs certified. If you don't know it much check out these videos with Arthur Fontaine
Looks like the date is in for our next IPCCTV Event -Thursday May 06, 2010, 09:30-12:30
We've been working with Guys at King Communications to get the tweak the agenda for the intended audience. We've listened to the feedback from the last three events and think this one will be even better than the last.
The event will be held at the Dakota Hotel at Eurocentral will feature a number of in depth demonstrations of Milestone XProtect Corporate software and you will be able to see the systems running on IBM System X Servers and Storage.
XProtect 3.1 and Smart Client 5.0 Launch Webinar MIPS 2010 from Fredrik Wallberg on Vimeo.
The last event had over 60 attendees and we expect more this year. You can register on the Kings Event landing page here and if you want to let your network know what you are up to you can declare you are attending on linkedin.com by adding the event to your linkedin profile.#ipcctv #ipcctvscotland
Just spent a few days in fine company snowboarding in Saalbach Austria. Had an absolute ball. Sore bum from the hill and sore head from the beer but it's all good...
Anyone who thinks this pic is actually me - leave my blog - we can't be friends any more. I also discovered Mozart's Balls - he sure has tasty balls - not just a composer you know a chef too.... who knew.
This year's (Scottish) Lotusphere Comes to you Event has been announce and the word on the grapevine is it will be a corker, with even more great demos. I know David Hood has been working on bringing the right people to the show. We'll be there along with the usual suspects and of course hoping to see many more new folks along. Why not tell a friend...
You can get updates and register (not quite yet) for the Edinburgh event at http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/events/lcty2010/europe.html
If in the meantime you want to let your contacts know you're interested or are planning to attend I've created an event on Linkedin so you can let folk know you are going and get some of your own networking done at the event too.
Some of you folks may be interested to attend Avocent's Winter breakfast briefing at Murrayfield.
You can find out about the Government's new CRC scheme, The CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme (formerly known as the Carbon
Reduction Commitment) is the UK's mandatory climate change and energy
saving scheme, due to start in April 2010. Joan Ruddock speaks about the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme
If you cannot see the video download the latest Flash player
And also find out about Avocent MergePoint® Infrastructure Explorer (AMIE) software which really makes managing data your data centre easy and extremely energy efficient.
AMIE has a great GUI and some delicious features for managing migrations. Want to know what was/it/will be in Rack #7 rows 15-25? Very interesting. The visualisation, calendaring and librabry feeds are key, after all if you can see it, you can understand it... which allows you to know, plan and manage your data centre effectively. It's no just pretty mind - there is sub-rack power management great for you hosting providers out there. I've whacked a few pics in here to give you an idea...
Project Planning
Putting some kit into the Data Centre
Rack front view of equipment
Rack rear view of the equipment
As reported recently online by Nick Heath and others Companies that lose individuals' sensitive personal data will face a
fine of up to £500,000 under powers expected to come into force from
April.
The powers will allow the UK's privacy watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office, to fine private and public sector organisations that commit a serious breach of the Data Protection Act.
Justice minister Michael Wills laid a statutory instrument before Parliament on Tuesday, setting the maximum fine at £500,000. The instrument will become law by default on 6 April this year, unless Parliament objects.
All very topical since we are (in conjunction with IBM) running an Event covering - The importance of Web application security - today's most significant online threat.
A few of the guys from our team will be heading along to this Scotland IS event in Edinburgh. Especially since in this area we have the skills to pay the bills ;-).
So if you are one of the majority of people whose spending on IT Security is in all the wrong places perhaps we and this event can help. The event is targeted for IT staff.
IT is a useful truth however that the buck rarely stops with IT in my experience from a Data Protection responsibility perspective. So if that's you and you are not IT we can come and speak to you about this stuff and help you determine whether you are properly protected or not. It's all about the due diligence - not the geeking out. Though I, like many others enjoy geeking out.
Here's a little something to chew on from a cost and risk perspective...
Are you
confident this won’t happen to you?
A North American
Retailer claimed that over 45.6 million cards belonging to customers were
compromised in an intrusion that went undetected for over 18 months; however,
several banks suing the company claim the actual number is 94 million cards,
a vast majority of them issued by Visa. The breach prompted numerous lawsuits
and calls for stronger data protection laws. By the retailers own estimates,
the company has spent or set aside close to US$250 million for costs
stemming from the incident.
We are working with the Rational folks at IBM on a wee dram of and Event at the Whisky Society in Edinburgh. It should be pretty useful and a thoroughly good day out.
Event details on Scotland IS site
Probably relevant if....
You have a development team and you are interested in...
.......Or have an interest in Jazz (no comment)....
......You get all hot and flustered over Software Security & Compliance and love to.....
.... or perhaps the Software
Quality isn't quite what you would like and you have been known to say things like this but perhaps in a less marketing robot fashion
Hope to see you there....
