Learning, Problem Solving, Collaboration, and MITEC
May 20, 2013 Dan Burger
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The Michigan IBM i and AIX Technical Education Conference (MITEC), the annual opportunity for Power Systems professionals to distinguish themselves and the companies they work for by building on their current skills, is coming up June 4. The training day is sponsored by six local user groups in Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio, and has 51 sessions on its agenda. MITEC is one of the top Power Systems technical conferences in the nation, with attendance topping 200. Paul Ubelhor, one of the volunteers who helps plan and organize the conference, says the forecast for the event is excellent. “Things are shaping up nicely,” he wrote in an email. “Vendor booths are sold out and more would have come if there was room. There was a lot of vendor interest this year. Registrations are at last year’s level and we are attracting new attendees from out of the general area. We have people registered from Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Toronto. Hopefully, employers are seeing the value in a one-day, reasonably priced conference.” It’s interesting to note how most companies, and even many individuals, determine value by a single point in time–by judging one day out of the office as too disruptive rather than performance and productivity enhancements over time. There are companies, however, that see opportunities to start laying a foundation for IT improvements through training and education and view conferences like MITEC as a way to gather project-specific advice, update the knowledge base, get questions answered, make valuable contacts, and learn about other similar projects that have succeeded or gone belly up. Not only do they gain perspective as well as expertise, but perhaps most importantly this is a sanity check. The right topics, instructors, location, and price add up to value when measured over time. A quick glance at MITEC session topics shows that it covers a lot of ground: system architecture, application development, system administration, Web services, mobile applications, PHP, SQL, external storage, backup and recovery, and DB2 for i. And that’s just a glance. A complete listing of sessions, schedules, and speakers is available online. And a quick peek at the speakers list includes popular subject matter experts such as Paul Tuohy, Larry Bolhuis, Charles Guarino, Pete Massiello, and Jackie Jansen. The opening session speaker is IBM‘s Tracy Smith. He has been a speaker in the Rochester Executive Briefing Center, technical leader for Power Systems upgrade planning, and is the team lead for technical sales support where he specializes in the delivery of the latest Power Systems technologies. The conference is held at the VisTaTech Center, a state of the art facility for training, business meetings, and corporate events located in Livonia, Michigan. The center is 25 minutes from the Detroit Metro Airport. For additional details, see the conference website at www.gomitec.com. RELATED STORIES Enthusiasm, Persistence, And The IBM i Payoff Michigan LUG Members Face Reality-Based Web Query Training Michigan PHP Program Progressing Nicely Reality-Based PHP Training on IBM i in Michigan
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