Welcome Maria Nordin to ISW & Kudos!

Now this is exciting! I am so very happy to welcome Maria Nordin to the ISW team. Many in the IBM Connections community knows Maria well. Maria is one of the leaders behind the amazing Social Connections team, and comes to us from a great company Infoware in Sweden where she was the Product Manager for Domain Patrol Social. Maria will be joining us from August 20th starting with a trip to Australia to get up and running(....away from the dreaded Australian Drop Bears Maria;)

Maria will be taking on the role of leading our business development activities in Europe working with our many and growing Kudos and Buzzy customers in that part of the world. It will be great to finally have someone in that timezone that can have daily contact with our wonderful customers. With Maria's passion and background around Connections, Watson Workspace, and Social Business/Collaboration, we are also looking forward to her ideas around making our solutions even better. Europe has always been a great market for Kudos and we have many successful customers over there so it is wonderful that we can provide a higher level of service to them as well.

And of course Maria is also an IBM Champion for ICS! This brings the number of champions at ISW to 4 with Jared Roberts, Jay Agrawal, and myself. How cool is that!

IBM Announced a new mega conference - THINK 2018

Big news from IBM on the event/conference front.

Think about it...AI, Cloud, Data, IoT, and Security. They have merged in your world... and they have in ours too. That's why we're excited to announce a first ever event that reflects the way you do business: IBM Think 2018. Bringing together World of Watson and InterConnect to form the technology industry's most important event. - https://www.ibm.com/events/think/

The current events include Connect, InterConnect, Amplify, Edge, Vision, World of Watson and PartnerWorld. All merged into IBM THINK 2018.

From my view this is a great thing. I have attended many many of these events over the last 20 years, and they in isolation have been fantastic. But the "in isolation" part is the problem. Many organisations can't justify going to multiple events, so you tend to get the same crowd at each of the events. By bringing them together you expand the audience and enable a lot more cross polination of ideas and learning. I think this is a great thing for IBM as no longer are their solutions in isolated silos, they are integrated platforms across multiple domains.

I for one am very pleased to see this merged together, and on a personal not means I will no longer have a clash with my daughters birthdays in Jan and Feb! And I get to stay in Australia for the summer! I know some will have mixed feelings however. One massive event will make it hard to get across all content in a short period of time, and I know some customers have told me that they can only send x number of people to each event so they prefer to have multiple events.

On the naming I really like it. "THINK" has always been an iconic word for IBM. Even my grandfather has always told me "Just Think" and everything else will work itself out!

"As IBM president 1914 to 1956, Thomas J. Watson, Sr. enjoyed using the phrase "THINK!" to motivate and inspire his employees." - http://oldcomputers.net/ibm-thinkpad.html 

See you there in March 2018!