Planes, Trains, and Taxis

The last week of September I spent five days in Europe, with stops in the UK (Fleet); The Netherlands (Amsterdam); and Belgium (Antwerp). The journey was all about visiting our European customers. For me, it was a great experience navigating the train systems and taxis to visit as many customers as possible each day. As you travel across the European marketplace, you learn to love continental Europe’s mass transit system. It’s really easy to blog while sitting in a rail car with full WiFi.

New Locations, Familiar Issues

Although the travel style is different, the customer issues are the same. These customers need help with automating and monitoring their environment as much as anyone else. The good news is that the world of automation is very much alive. Two customers I visited actually preach my sermon: management by exception and event-driven processes.

It was fun to show off product directions and to have customers tell me that exceptions are better than a dashboard. These customers were running a true lights-out environment. We also discussed security and business intelligence issues. Many companies are concerned about SOX because they either supply a multinational company or are part of one.

Many, Many Industries

I visited customers in multiple industries: banking, retail, insurance, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, and chemicals. It was fun to see the different applications of IBM i servers. Most customers were on V6R1 or were consolidating to a bigger server (the same as North America). Very few customers are on V7R1.

One interesting story was the customer consolidating servers at a Belgium location. They have servers from the United States, Chile, Brazil, South Africa, Japan, Australia, and Sweden in their consolidated environment, each geographic area having its own partition. The have to deal with issues concerning security, multiple languages and time zones, disaster recovery, automation, and high availability.

Final Stop—A Dream Come True

My last stop of the week was at GAME, the UK’s leading games retailer. They have a lot of Help/Systems products: Robot, PowerTech, and SEQUEL. They believe in automation and it’s impressive that they have one person in charge of two model 550 servers, each with four partitions.

The automation is really apparent when you tour their assembly line. What an amazing process watching them build their game distributions for stores around the world! All I could think of was my 18-year old son. This would have been a dream come true for him to see all of the boxes of games and game stations, piled throughout the automated warehouse, about to be shipped.

Suddenly, it’s Friday and back to the States for me with the realization that, although the world is getting smaller, jet lag stays the same. It was great to visit these different countries and see our products being used in a wide variety of businesses. And, I really enjoyed sharing our future product roadmaps with our European customers.

Av Revoir, Cheers, Bye!