Does this mean that I'm no longer going to write articles for DominoPower, and instead work all day coding WebSphere applications before going to sleep holding my stuffed Tux the penguin? No, that's not what I'm saying, although the penguin is looking kind of cute as you can see in Figure A.

FIGURE A

Loving the penguin. Click picture for a larger image.

If I had to choose one word to describe my overall reaction to the IBM developerWorks Live! event, it would be "overwhelming." For a person like me who has been intensely involved with Domino applications on a day-to-day basis for many years, it's a big change when the main thrust of the conference is no longer focused on Lotus and what it's doing with its next product releases, but rather on the entirety of IBM's product line.

This event was a big change from last year's Lotus DevCon, which took place in Las Vegas. The venue was San Francisco, a world away from the glitter of the Vegas Strip. It was just a little over an hour away from where I live, although I did get the chance to stay in a hotel for the conference, which was a good thing since I could go back to my room and rest my brain regularly.

While the "Lotus DevCon" name still existed, it was used as just a sub-brand under IBM developerWorks Live! But let's face it, all you had to do was to look at your conference badge (shown in Figure B) to remember you were at an IBM event, not a Lotus event.

FIGURE B

One look at the badge and you know that you're at an IBM event. Click picture for a larger image.

Lotus was just one of the four main product lines. The opening session that started at 8:00 on Wednesday didn't have Al Zollar until 9:47. This is understandable, given how much they had to present from the other business divisions. But, again, it just goes to reinforce that this was an IBM event first and a Lotus event second (or third or fourth).

The size of the conference surprised me, as well. I knew it would be bigger than last year's Lotus DevCon event, but I didn't know how big. It turned out that the conference had over 4,000 attendees from 43 countries, with more than 200 press representatives alone. That's a pretty impressive attendance for hard economic times.