COMMON Takes a Trip to DisneyWorld for 2010

Published: February 23, 2009

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It's a little too early to book your plane tickets, make your hotel accommodations, and dust off your mouse ears, but it is never too early to tell your kids or grandkids that the COMMON midrange expo and conference is going to be hosted in Orlando, Florida in 2010.

My daughter, Ellie, and my son, Hank, have fond memories of when COMMON was last in Orlando, back in 2005. They bug me every couple of months about when my next business trip will take us down south toward the House of Mouse, or any place interesting, for that matter. (When the annual Red Hat Expo was in Nashville, we had friends stationed in Fort Knox and we did a big trip there. Didn't get any gold.) I personally have fond memories of the 3 million square foot hotel pool with the three hot tubs, one with a built-in bar, and the time I spent with my family and my co-workers at DisneyWorld before the show. Being a geographically distributed company--I joke that we are a virtual company or virtually a company, it is hard to say for sure--I don't get to see the people I work with every day very often, and they don't see each other very often, either. So shows like COMMON are like a water cooler is for most companies. And it can be an oasis, too.

The impending COMMON conference is being held at the end of April 26 through 30 in Reno, Nevada. Considering the state of the economy and the slashing of travel budgets, it is hard to say what attendance at the Reno event will look like. So far, as of February 4, more than 80 exhibitors are planning to attend the event and discuss the solutions they provide to the market at the show's expo hall. IT Jungle will be sending a team to the event as well, and we will give you the skinny about what goes down at COMMON Reno if you can't attend yourself.

By early May 2010, when the 50th anniversary of the founding of COMMON celebration will be held at the Orlando conference, hopefully the economy will have stabilized and maybe even rebounded some. Actually, I would be just as happy for stabilization sometime maybe around mid-day tomorrow. . . .

One last thing: COMMON and IBM are once again sponsoring the annual Innovation Awards, and you can sign up to nominate an innovator at this link up until February 27. Because we are all one, big, happy Power Systems family and COMMON is trying to position itself as the Power Systems conference and expo, the five different award categories can be for Power Systems platforms running i, AIX, or Linux. (They damned well better all have some i component as far as I am concerned.) COMMON and IBM are giving an award to a college or university that has done right by the Academic Initiative (probably the DeVry Institute this year, is my guess); to a company that demonstrates energy efficiency; that creates Web solutions on Power Systems (including but not limited to Java and PHP); to a company with an innovative business solution (a vague category, but could be interesting); and to a company that pushes server virtualization on a Power Systems or BladeCenter box in a mixed operating system environment. Business partners are not eligible for the awards, but they can and should nominate their customers. IBM and COMMON will pick the winners and contact them in the middle of March so they can plan to attend COMMON Reno to get their awards.

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