We’re at the lovely oceanside Asilomar conference grounds a couple of hours drive south of San Francisco for this year’s bpmNEXT conference. Last year’s inaugural conference was a great experience – I wrote 7,000+ words in two days, if that’s any indication – and this year’s lineup looks like a winner.
This conference is about what’s happening next in BPM (as you might guess by the name): no sales pitches or death by PowerPoint, but a look at the technology directions as seen through demos. It’s also a great opportunity for networking, with a lot of the well-known names in BPM here in person meeting each other face-to-face for a change.
Bruce Silver and Nathaniel Palmer, our hosts and organizers, kicked off the conference and laid out the rules: each session (except for the keynote and a multi-company interoperability demo) is strictly 30 minutes long, with 20 minutes for the demo and 10 for Q&A. Last year, Nathaniel would start to look a bit threatening when the speaker reached their deadline, and everything ran on time.
We have sessions this afternoon and into the evening focused on mobile apps and interfaces, then all day tomorrow and until early afternoon on Thursday on a variety of other BPM topics, so get ready for the firehose.