Why I think Lotusphere is a Great Event

It’s that time of the year again. As we enter the holiday season, I’m already looking forward to starting the New Year with an overview of the latest industry trends and learning about new technology opportunities.

I always felt that it would be nice if someone could give me a quick session and bring me up to speed with technological changes that happened over the past year; what others did with technology and how it helped them, some hands on labs where I could touch and feel all these new technologies in order to increase my confidence when recommending a solution. Lotusphere is just about that for me - it’s a dream come true; exactly what an IT Manager, Decision Maker, Architect, Developer would love to start the year with.

Lotusphere offers Jumpstart sessions to know and understand new products and get a personal touch and feel for them. You get to look out for new technologies offered, their business value, implications, and related opportunities.

In short, Lotusphere features:

• Sessions that provide a comprehensive, step-by-step detail on specific technologies
• Sessions that provide practical solutions that others have used for solving complex problems of new technologies
• Sessions that cover a breadth of topics from core development skills to those needed to build social applications
• Sessions that talk about the latest features and product capabilities, deployment techniques
• Sessions on product architecture specifically helpful in planning future data center needs and possible opportunities in that area for being creative

If this dose of solid knowledge foundation wasn’t enough, you get to meet and discuss with IBMers from across the globe that are part of design and development teams across most of these technologies. In general, you wouldn’t get to meet this many IBMers under one roof even if you visited an IBM office. Lotusphere presents a great opportunity for every one to socialize and interact with like-minded people, visionaries and thought leaders of the industry.

Finally, the amount of business opportunities Lotusphere presents for everyone is unlike any other show. I have met many of my current customers at previous Lotusphere conferences and had opportunities to interact with them and share how the latest technologies can be leveraged to solve even their toughest business challenges. I make sure to bring many of my customers to Lotusphere so that they can gain knowledge on new trends and technologies. It makes it much easier for me to discuss these new technologies and apply them to their current business problems.

And for me the fun just doesn’t end there; it’s a welcome break from the snow and freezing temperatures of Colorado to spend a week in the warm setting of Orlando!

Prabhakar Goel is a Solution Architect with Prolifics and a key member of highly specialized team of IBM WebSphere experts involved in architecture and delivery of Business Integration solutions, High transaction commercial portals and Solutions based on Open source technologies. He is an expert providing End-to-End SOA implementations utilizing IBM suite of products like Portal, Connections, Content Management, Process Server. He holds Masters in Software Systems from BITS, Pilani and a Graduate Degree in Electrical Engineering from Kurukshetra.