My Innovate conference again was filled with OSLC discussions. I found it tough to get to many sessions this year, which was rather unfortunate due to the large number of high quality content. My schedule consisted of a mix of presenting, customer meetings and exhibit hall duties (probably sounds familiar to most attendees).
Monday June 6th:
Opening Keynote - inclusion of content about Eclipse Lyo (OSLC SDK) project proposal, which was good to hear.
I was off to the new "
I presented "ISM-1071 Improve Collaboration between Support and Development Using Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration" with John Arwe from Tivoli. About 30 people in attendance and good questions about how the integration works. We'll have to wait to see what he survey says.
Due to some networking the night before at the reception, the Tivoli SRM and ClearQuest OSLC-based integration was working (early prototype) just in time for exhibit hall opening.
Then I was off to the Interop Center for final setup and opening. Of course, there were some problems but was able to recover just in the nick of time. There was a slow start to the traffic as attendees made their way to the back (and past the food and bar). Feedback from the ped staff across the board stated that they were very pleased with the amount of traffic and discussions on-going.
Tuesday June 7th:
Early day discussions and breakfast with a customer and their integrations. This was mostly focused on adoption of RTC and how to co-exist with CC/CQ setup. Though some discussion on Siemens integration was brought up.
Late morning I ran the workshop "TW-1161 OSLC enable your tool in a day" (based on OSLC Tutorial Part 2) which was wait-listed but only had about 35 out of 50 capacity actual show. Throughout the week I had many people ask if the workshop was going to be run a second time during the week, something to consider in the future. The workshop went really well in my mind. A good number of students were able to get through all the labs in the amount of time given. I was able to get into some great discussions from some of the attendees. I gave many copies of the material to IBMer's who said that it was exactly what their account teams and colleagues needed and were going to share with them. Some of the attendees had 3rd party providers already in plan and had good design discussions about how to approach. Great feedback from these attendees on the value of the workshop for them and on this effort.
I was able to attend some of John Arwe's session titled "Extending OSLC" which was a very full session. John talked about how OSLC approach (both community and technical) can be applied to integrated service management (ISM).
Presented TJI-1072 Keys to Building and Consuming Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration Providers in Support of Open Lifecycle Integrations" just as the exhibit hall is about to open. There was a good mix of attendees here, some familiar faces and none I have seen before (IBM and not). There were some good questions throughout (people trying to jump ahead).
Ran back over to the Interop Center for more good interaction with attendees.
After exhibit hall closed we held "BOF-2319A Lifecycle Integration: Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration" which had great participation from Rational technical leaders, AIM, Tivoli, Siemens, Tasktop and more. Discussion was started by reviewing progress on recent "2.0-based" specs such as Core, CM, RM, QM and AM. Other community topics including open-source, alignment with other standards efforts (W3C linked data/semantic web) and need to continue as an independent community. Some observations were that OSLC is now part of Rational's "fabric" (as Martin Nally says) and part of every integration discussion.
Wednesday June 8th:
Was fortunate enough to make it back to the keynote to catch IBM Watson and IBM Fellow Grady Booch. I thought it was great to see Grady using the Rational tools to describe the internals of Watson. My only "criticisms" were:
- it was near impossible to read/understand the diagrams
- there was no connection to DeepQA and how it uses Linked Data / Semantic Web technologies, the same that OSLC and the Jazz Platform are based on. Thought it would have been a very powerful connection
- it would also have been insightful to get Grady's thoughts on how this technology will influence the "tools" that we Rational are building. The last chart had something about areas IBM is exploring: healthcare, helpdesk, etc but not "
development intelligence"
Interop Center again! Final session we thought was going to be slow to start, it was the opposite, started strong and finished a little slow. We held a retrospective after the exhibit hall closed. One thing that made it clear to me that the ped staff, even though they just finished a tough few days, were energized by the reaction they got and had many great ideas on how to improve/enhance it in the future.
Met with a customer who has both Rational and Tivoli products. It was good to see that our strategy and solutions really resonated with them, they were pleased with our direction and looking to deploy it this year.
Thursday June 9th:
I attended "CS-1651A Leveraging Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration for Project Management Information Using Excel to Improve Software Delivery" presented by our colleagues from IBM Japan, NEC and Fujitsu. This was very well attended, especially with the Japanese attendees. This was a very interesting presentation on the differences in how projects are run in Japan and the tools used. It provided an interesting approach using OSLC-enabled Excel to connect to and from tools like RTC. I look forward to seeing their progress.
In Summary:
I found very few people who didn't know what OSLC was at a high-level but when presenting during my sessions some of the feedback I got was that I had cleared some misconceptions that they had. Also the message is clear that customers would like to see more participation in OSLC by key ALM/PLM tool vendors and ways for it to continue to operate as an independent entity. Many were encouraged to hear about the Eclipse Lyo project proposal and the continued contributions to open source. It was great to meet some colleagues for the first time in person, catch up with others and make new connections. I look forward to the continued collaboration and reach of OSLC.
