As we near the end of the SHARE week in Austin, Director of Conference Operations Al Williams shares his thoughts with us. I think he'll really whet your appetite for what's in store for SHARE in Denver, August 23 - 28, 2009.
Al Williams, Director of Conference Operations
As we get close to wrapping up another successful SHARE conference, I think you will agree that Austin has been a wonderful venue. Now it is time for us to start looking forward to our next venue. Denver is a great city to visit, and has some similarities to Austin. It is a pleasant city to walk around in.
Within a few blocks of the convention center you will find the 16th Street Mall, a pedestrian friendly street with lots of shops and restaurants. It is within easy walking distance from the convention center and the Hyatt hotel.
We will be using a part of the Denver Convention Center for our technical sessions and for the trade show. It is a very attractive and functional meeting space. You can have a look at the facility by looking at the interactive floor plans map at denver.share.org/interactive. To get a peek at what the inside actually looks like, take a virtual tour at denver.share.org/virtual.
It has been a busy week for all our volunteers. In addition to the normal workload of delivering the conference, we have been working on a new way to present the strengths of SHARE to our customers. We are providing a customer view of our areas of expertise that is not directly connected to our internal organizational structure:
- System z: z/OS & z/VM Theme
- Enterprise Data Center
- Application Architecture and Integration
- Information Management
- Communications Services
- Total Enterprise Virtualization
- Service Orientation
The call for presentation proposals from trade show participants, members and attendees is going out now using this approach. Here is the pointer to the call for presentations on our Web site: denver.share.org/present. We are asking for session proposals relative these topics and theme areas that do not directly match our SHARE organizational structure. This is a part of our strategy to provide a customer facing view of our conference that centers on what we offer instead of how we happen to be organized.
This is going to be a great meeting venue and city, and of course, the content will be tremendous! I look forward to seeing you there.