Colin White continued on after his RSS presentation to give a wrap-up of the entire conference. Considering that he’s the only thing standing between people and their flights (or the pool, in my case), it’s pretty sparsely attended. I’m staying in the room to avoid the Häagen-Dazs that’s on the coffee break table outside; after 4 conferences in 7 weeks, I have “conference bulge” and need to get back to brown rice and broccoli for a while.
He makes the point, as he did yesterday, that the audience has changed dramatically from previous PCC conferences, both in terms of their technical focus and the external-facing nature of the portals that they’re building. Uh-oh, he just said “Portals 2.0”, a sure sign that he’s trying to Web 2.0-ify the somewhat less glamorous field of portals.
He points out the problem today of multiple portal environments: every big vendor has a portal platform, and they all want you to use theirs if you use any of their other products. At some point, you need to reduce the number of portal environments or find some way to federate them.
There was a lengthy discussion about the vendor presence here. There were a few major portal vendors who were not in the showcase; I suspect that this is a fairly small conference for many of the vendors and it’s just not worth their marketing budget. White said that they’re revisiting the idea of allowing vendors to present, possibly either in short demo sessions or other forums that are not marketing in nature.
At the end of it all, I’m left wondering why I’m here as a speaker. BPM is pretty peripheral to the topic of PCC (although my session was well-attended), and I was slotted in on the morning of the last day, when likely most of the other speakers have already bailed out. Since Shared Insights is only covering two nights of hotel in my travel expenses, I wasn’t here to attend and blog about the entire conference, but was here only for yesterday afternoon and this morning. I wasn’t invited to participate in the speaker one-on-one sessions (where most of the speakers made themselves available to attendees for 30-minute sessions on a sign-up schedule), so feel a bit like a second stringer on the speaker roster. I think that the original interest was around a blog post that I did some time ago about Web 2.0 and BPM, which leads me back to my earlier comment about how they’re trying to Web 2.0-ify this conference; possibly I was part of that effort. In any case, my area of expertise is much more suited to the Shared Insights BPM conference series, so maybe I’ll end up speaking at one of those some day soon.
In the mean time, it’s off to the pool.