Recommendations

Hi everyone! I'm sorry I'm late to the show, it's been very busy for us!

I have a few ideas that I thought I would run by the group. Feedback is always welcome.

I'd love to see the vendors sponsor a "bake off" of sorts, where a reasonable (for the time alloted) use case is kept private. The morning of the bake-off, each vendor will get an hour to study the use case and then have a few hours to use their respective tools and then present their solution to the attendees. (You may get more vendors as sponsors this way as well.)

The use case should be one that is applicable to all of the BRMS products on the market, and can be extremely technical. Perhaps you could provide a SOA infrastructure for web services calls, database, etc. I think if you get one vendor to bring down a server running VMWare, you can have various instances of a database, application server, etc... all running on one well equipped machine.

Points will be given on various criteria, as determined by the judges or panel, etc. Every vendor will be given an opportunity to showcase their solution and execute it, metrics can be taken (if reasonable considering the environment), etc.

Given the amount of time, I don't think that having a sequential bake-off and RETE-based bake-off is possible. The use case should be able to be solved both sequentially or by RETE.

(Sorry James, but the 64 queens contest isn't a real business use case.) :)

There is so much marketing hype out there, it would be nice to get "technical" and "put up, or shut up..." :)

Thoughts?

Also, ending on a Friday night and expecting people to leave on Saturday will not work for most. I'm not even sure if dove tailing this to the BRF is a good idea either, as you want the most attendees. Spacing it out by a month or more may allow for more people to attend both conferences.

If you want the MOST attendees, then have it on a Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Airfares are cheap with a Saturday night stay, and if people have to take vacation time for the conference, they will only need one or two days, depending on where they are traveling from / to.

Best,

David Kim, CEO
Innovations Software Technology Corp.