Tuesday is always a great day at CA World. We kicked of the day with the innovation Keynote address "Building Software for the application economy" by Amit Chatterjee. It highlighted how we have become dependent on software and how companies that were once in the manufacturing business are now in equally in the Software business. Nike was a great example and so was the plug for Nike looking for Software Developers. The comment of the day came from Samsung during the round table with Samsung, CA, Facebook, and Nike. "Smart phones are not smart, they are stupid. Well ours is not. Ours is dumb the reset are stupid". Sorry if I do not have it exact I have not had a chance to listen to the session again, you can it is on Live - CA Technologies
At 11:00 am the session "CA PPM: The road ahead" was a major hit. Where the theatre sat 300 well over 500 attended the session. Kurt Steinle discussed the vision forward for CA PPM and his passion in resolving long standing issues in the product was quite evident. This session alone was worth coming to CA World. With this passion behind the product I see great things coming for CA PPM. The rationale behind the change from Business Objects to Jaspersoft was also explained. While there might be some work on updating custom reports, the change is well justified and I eagerly look forward to getting my hands on Jaspersoft. The demos I took part in were very impressive.
All the other session I took part in were highly engaging and well received. Increasing value of PPM with financial management could of lasted longer after witnessing the number of questions that the audience still had after it completed. Both presenters were happy to answer the questions. This is what CA World is all about. Customers helping customers and that was visible throughout the conference floor with customers sharing their experiences and providing advice to one another.
While this is the community and we should not be advertising here, what I am within next is not a personal endorsement, but for informational for all those that did not attend. Anyone who is technical has a toolkit of various SQL queries that that use to help manage and troubleshoot CA PPM. We all want to put them into portlet form, but never have the time. Our own Stephen Forney (He is the one who is managing our CA PPM Sandboxes) has made these queries into a highly impressive set of portlets. Since Stephen works for Excers, they made the decision to make a large number of the portlets available to the CA PPM customers for free. I recommend that you request a demonstration. We will also try to have the free portlets demo'd at the next CA PPM GUC meeting.
Finally, the day was capped off with event night. Ping, Pong tables, pool tables, shuffle board were all actively used and in some cases I witnessed how seriously people take ping pong. They were truly awesome players. The food was great and the roast turkey and stuffing reminded me of my grandmothers. Dim Sung, pot roast, vegetarian fair, and more, helped to satisfy the food cravings of all that attended. The dinner was capped off by a performance of the Fray. Their highly charged performance had the house rocking, and this was evident by the vast number of cell phone cameras trying to capture the performance.
I have managed to capture a large part of CA World on camera, but unfortunately the recent upgrade on my MacBook Pro interferes with download images from my camera. I will post the images when I get back to Toronto.
Until tomorrow, Have a grate day.
Michael Thibault