Pink Elephant on Parade

We’re going to be posting more detailed information about the interesting sessions we’ve been attending at Pink Elephant’s 12th Annual International IT Service Management Conference & Exhibition. In the meantime, here are some early random thoughts from the folks at IT’s About Uptime…

• What would be cooler than making an entrance into a room full of 1900 people on the back of an elephant? That’s how Pink Elephant President David Ratcliffe started the opening general session. A very cool way to get things started, indeed. The only problem is deciding what to do next year. Two elephants? A pride of lions?

(Photo Credit: Pink Elephant)

• Where is the love for release managers? Configuration managers and change managers get their own breakout sessions at ITIL/ITSM conferences, but there doesn’t seem to be a large amount of material or sessions tailored specifically to release managers. Our guess is that organizations haven’t matured to the point where the release manager position is developed and distinct from change management, but to truly give testing its due, we need to give the release manager function more attention and guidance. Look for a more detailed blog post on this in the near future.

• Who made the $%&#ing change? This isn’t so much a random thought as the content on a funny t-shirt that our Webinar partners at Ecora were giving out at the conference.

• How long can 5 people stand in a 10×10 area before one of them keels over? We’ve had lots of people come by to ask us about StackSafe Test Center, so that has made our trade show booth a busy place. We’ve been very pleased with the response we’ve received at our first Pink Elephant show. (Having our product named as a finalist for the Pink Elephant Innovation of the Year Award hasn’t hurt either.)

• How much downtime is too much? We’ve blogged about it and other people have blogged about it. Recent outages, including Wordpress, Bebo, RIM/Blackberry and (in the social network world) Twitter are raising interesting questions about how much downtime customers/users will take. In any event, the question of using change and release management as a way to address uptime requirements seems to be on more people’s minds than ever before.

• Anyone need a beer? It has been a fun week so far, and we’ve enjoyed the folks we’ve been meeting at the show. Also, Pink Elephant is, indeed, named after a bar in Belgium. We had a Pink Elephant staffer confirm this for us on Monday evening. Mystery solved.

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Filed Under: ITIL, StackSafe Corporate