I have started using Tripit to organise my travel and it’s great. Tripit allows you to build your trips including all your flights, hotels and rental cars – and then download it onto a PDA for quick reference when on the run (check it out at www.tripit.com). One neat feature of Tripit is that it counts the cities you visit and looks into your Linkedin network to see if any of your contacts are in the same city at the same time. When I last looked it said I had travelled 117,395 kilometers to 17 locations in the past couple of months!

You can probably guess that I spend a fair share of my time standing in baggage claim waiting for my bag to drop down the chute onto the caracole and it’s always a great relief to see it when it does – except sometimes it doesn’t! I found myself separated from my bag twice on this latest trip and it’s not a good feeling. I expect it’s the same sinking feeling you get when you discover your machine has just crashed and your last backup was yesterday at 4pm. Fortunately for me – I now keep some spare clothes and a toothbrush in my carry-on and this is usually enough to see me through until my bag finally shows up – which it did both times.

It shows how important a backup is!

On my way to attend the recent Common Conference in Orlando, I was reading a copy of USA Today. Blazoned across the front page was the ongoing story about the BP Oil rig “Deepwater Horizon” which exploded on April 20th sinking and spilling many thousands of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Apparently a plan to upgrade a shut-off valve which would have cost around $2Million was rejected by management some years ago – The reason? – They pointed out that the chances of a disaster where too remote to warrant the investment.

Now there are damages in the billions, wildlife and delicate wetlands are under severe threat and immeasurable damage has been done to BP’s international reputation. To say that as a company they sorely regret that earlier decision would be a huge understatement.

As Ben Franklin pointed out – it’s better to forestall a disaster than to have to deal with the aftermath.

We had an Apple i-PAD running our monitor and it looked outstanding. We were able to show attendees how to drill down and monitor the *noMAX data replication and also get a real-time health check on their IBM i.

Booth traffic was steady and I think it was the best Common Conference in many years. A lot of the other vendors felt the same about the conference and I know our partner RJS who had a booth just opposite us were run off their feet at times. There was a real positive buzz that has been missing around the IBMi for a while – and it was great to have it back.

Whichever way you look at it – ninety percent of companies running on the IBM i are still using tape as their core disaster recovery medium, when a cost effective real-time replication solution would protect them from downtime and data loss and it seems that message is getting through to many IT Managers.

“Upbeat” was probably the best way to describe the three days and IBM helped the positive feel with a raft of new announcements around the IBM i and Power 7.

Common is an event well worth attending and I hope it is now back on the fast track – it’s still a long way from the heady days of the late 90’s when the event attracted an attendance of 5000 plus – but it sure was an improvement on the past few years.