Here I am, at TechEdNA09, walking around the Partner part of the floor and I come across the Cisco Booth “Hey, want to play our game? Just answer a few questions and you could win a Flip Mino Ultra Camera!”  I’m always game, for well, playing a game so I definitely took the opportunity to try to play.   For those of you not familiar with this game, it’s a basic touch screen of a question and 4 selections (A, B, C, D) you have to choose from.

Once you press continue the game starts, and you’re off!   Well, it took me 7 seconds (Yes, 7 seconds, because I’m an idiot! But I’m only an idiot once, and for a VERY short amount of time)  but seriously, it took me 7 seconds to decide “oh, I should hit the ABCD at the bottom and not the ones on the actual questions! Oh well, hey I’m tired! Leave me alone!) all that.. in 7secs ;)

So, I answer begin going through the questions at this point… Yay! answer, answer answer, wow look at all that Cisco Marketing Value Add proposition, UCS Value? Total rock! Got that!

(It’s a good thing I got my Ph,D. in inferred marketing knowledge, understanding of how questions are typically written, and I teach “how to answer questions” classes ;)

So, 26 seconds after my little ‘wtf where do I press’  hiccup, I finish the game.

Immediately after I finish the game the person running the game said “zOMFG! That’s the fastest anyone has done it” I’m paraphrasing a little bit here ;)

She says my chances of winning are fairly high… that’s cool, taking that into consideration and the fact that I’m already here I say the most expected thing you’d want in a booth as a vendor “Hey, since I’m likely to win this, tell me about your UCS value add!”

And here is where the fatal words come about, “Oh, err, sorry.  I’m just a booth babe!”

DoH!   Many discussions ensued around this during the week because apparently, I expect more of the people in the booths “Hey, there’s an attractive woman working in a high tech booth, they must know their product pretty solid to be there”.  Yes, I do make that assumption and will continue to make that assumption (high-tech is hot?! :))

Ofcourse, when it is clearly obvious I tend to not be ‘confused’ (there was a booth run by women in cocktail dresses? I don’t remember the product, because well, I’d rather talk to people who give off the impression of knowing their stuffs? k thx bye!)

Fortunately, every other booth I encountered run by beautiful women happened to be deeply technical and could discuss not only the product at a high level, but dive into the weeds with the best of them.   (If you were fortunate to meet up with the intelligent “babes” like those representing Accusoft Pegasus, AT&T DevCentral and  DevExpress you benefited intellectually for the better!)

Disclaimer: I do not ever refer to the term ‘babes’ outside of quotes, unless I’m talking about that movie with the pig, or somehow am strangely referring to a small group of extremely small children.  But I had to fit it within the scope of the “Booth Babe” phenomenon which I frankly was oblivious to, because I find that Women in Technology tend to be extremely accomplished and typically well distinguished.

The lesson I hope you take away from this is, assume intelligence and beauty over just chalking it up to a booth babe and the “Is there a man I can talk to?” as it’s rather demeaning not only to the individual, but to all women who invest in themselves and their futures.

We are  fortunate, that beauty and brains are simply a natural mixture :)

If there’s one thing about TechEd in my experience (Apparently, my experience isn’t everyones experience.. infact, I’m not sure ANYONE else experiences this ;)) is that it is a whirlwind adventure of constantly being on the run, on the go, and occasionally… getting heckled by the competition (Erk, can I call that ‘product’ competition? We don’t sell Laptops and Dell doesn’t sell storage [snicker ;)] :)

I like business cards, as they’re a good way to stay in touch with people you’ve met, definitely, right? Oh and Twitter, that’s good for it too.     But what if you don’t have any business cards? (ran out on the 1st day;)) I adopted the model of taking a photo of you and your badge.. Win?!

Because I wouldn’t want to publish anyone’s image and name without their permission, I’ll instead give you this one! (and this lovely story.. strangely retold many times throughout the show by others ;))

Meet mr Dell Guy, I didn’t catch his name (too blurry) but he definitely caught that I work for a competitor (Hey, I’m here as an attendee!) was my common response when assaulted! Even though I did have a number of lengthy and high quality NetApp related conversations, I had just as many good quality Education and Community conversations too.   But you don’t care about that! You care about the heckling! :)

Being at the front of the line, literally in the front as a drawing is called is always a good way to find out if you’re a winner, or… if you’re going to be publicly called out on.   Oh and a competitor being mic’d to a large crowd yelling out NetApp every other word, perhaps that is just good times. ;)

For what it is worth, I did not win the laptop they were giving away (Which mr Dell did say “You can’t win!”) as I scoff being a mere ‘attendee’ :)  Although if you’re interested I did win Flip Mino Ultra from Cisco (Notice Cisco in the background) – I’ll discuss that later in another story ;)

I wish I had more time to get around and enter into drawings or try to win mega-big prizes, but it was not in the cards.. I barely could pack all the swag I DID end up taking home, so no harm no foul! :)

Dell apparently sat back yesterday, watched all of the Cisco UCS announcements, and then said “I only see what I want to see” and apparently, all Dell sees is a Blade Server. Doh!

In this article Cisco Blade Server Misses the Mark Rick Be from Dell had the following to say:

17 March , 02:00 PM

Virtualization is undoubtedly a hot topic in the industry, especially today. After much anticipation, Cisco finally announced its “Project California.” As expected, Cisco launched its Unified Computing System (UCS), a blade server appliance designed for virtualization.

There has been a lot of discussion about what this means for Cisco’s partners in the virtualization server market. Are we partners? Are we competitors? Yes and yes. Dell continues to have a strategic networking partnership with Cisco to provide comprehensive solutions to our customers – today’s news does not change this.  Am I worried that Cisco’s new appliance will take away business from Dell? Not at all.

We’ve seen this before. Companies bring to market solutions that address a narrow population of customers or a single IT issue. While Cisco is a leader in the networking space, the server market is a very different ball game. CIOs aren’t looking for proprietary, appliance-like products like UCS because they drive up TCO and create more complexity. This is where Cisco has missed the mark.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the excitement about virtualization that Cisco’s news has generated is great. This is a technology that has revolutionized business computing and I am particularly passionate about it. It seems, however, that Cisco is a bit confused about what customers want and need from virtualization solutions.

When I am talking with customers, there are common themes that come up about what businesses want:

• Options and open standards – Flexibility is key to long term survival in today’s economy and this is what Dell delivers better than anyone else. Companies need more from a supplier than specialized, high-priced solutions. Businesses are looking for the whole package – a technology partner that can help them address and manage their large data sets, edge of the network workloads and everything else.
• Better total cost of ownership – Customers expect that innovation in IT will be focused on lowering the cost of operations WITHOUT significantly raising the price for the hardware.
• Simple management – Customers need the ability to manage their hardware locally. This is not possible with HP’s Virtual Connect –unless you have a 100% HP data center. And it does not appear to be possible with Cisco blades.

Dell’s strategy to simplify IT resonates with CIOs because it helps their organizations reclaim the most valued business resources: people, time and money. You will see exciting news from Dell in the coming months. Soon, we will introduce our totally redesigned Nehalem-based 11^th Generation PowerEdge virtualization servers. And you will also see us expand out partnerships to offer even more options for business looking to build open, flexible and powerful virtualized environments. Stay tuned.

I absolutely agree Flexibility is key for long-term survival, and reliability is paramount for survival period.    Look no further than Cisco for an example of what reliability is while establishing what open standards are, and how they’ll be pioneered and delivered upon.   It will be Cisco’s story in the future than when you think of Virtualization, you will think of Cisco and their significant role in the Datacenter and beyond.