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GWAVACon – Four Fun-Filled Days of Timely Instruction Plus Good Food, Good Business, Great Friends and Gurus Galore
Bonus Day (Saturday, January 22)
The weather was perfect in sunny southern California as GWAVACon began with bonus training day. The exhibit hall was set up and looking festive with booths from Novell, GWAVA, Ghost Pattern Software, Novacoast, EOS, Brainstorm, Notify, SEP, Kaspersky, SKyPRO, GroupLink and RIM.
Attendees received lots of great in-depth and intensive information on GWAVA products and GroupWise from GWAVA engineers and Novell ATT Live instructor, Paul Lamontagne. GWAVA also held the first annual Independent Novell Channel Conference for channel partners. The partner group discussed strategies from the upcoming year with input from Novell, GWAVA and each other.
Sunday, January 23
Sunday began the first “real” day of GWAVACon. Attendees poured into check-in early in the morning and filled up classes on topics such as ZENworks, Vibe OnPrem, GroupWise 8.3, GWAVA 5, DataSync, application virtualization and mobility.
The keynote address began with Richard Bliss, VP of Global Marketing at GWAVA, humorously reminding the audience of technology advances through the past four decades. He welcomed everyone, noting that 40% of the attendees are at their first GWAVACon. He promised that next year, bonus day would feature a ZENCon track featuring a full day of ZENworks training.
Richard then introduced Tom Fitzpatrick, Director of Marketing for Kaspersky, who then gave an informative presentation about the current state of malware threats. He explained that there are 35,000 new threats every day and that they are getting sneakier – there are many variants of the same virus and they are not as flashy as in the past.
Mr. Fitzpatrick helped identify that the endpoint should be the primary point for defense in any security strategy. The main target or insertion method for viruses remains email, with internet videos second. What can companies do to help combat the constant threat of cybercrime? The best approach is to create a culture of awareness, so users “don’t click on it!” He used the analogy of the Titanic to illustrate that compliance is not always enough. The Titanic was not only state-of-the-art, but safety compliant by having enough lifeboats for 1,200 hundred. Unfortunately, there were 3,500 passengers.
After another afternoon of productive and well-attended sessions, attendees and sponsors alike enjoyed a rousing round of “speed dating.” During speed dating, small groups of attendees rotated around the room, visiting each sponsor’s booth for a 90-second presentation of their product line. Lots of prizes were handed out to participants and the event gave everyone a chance to mix and mingle.
Monday, January 24
On Day Two of GWAVACon, sessions began bright and early and were filled to capacity. Popular classes included “How to Survive a Security Attack,” “Application Virtualization,” “Defining Your Mobility Strategy,” “Using DataSynchronizer,” “What’s New with OES,” “GroupWise 8.0.2 Features,” plus Reload, GWAVA labs and lots more.
Richard Bliss introduced the featured keynote speaker, Colleen O’Keefe, Senior VP and General Manager Collaboration Solutions and Global Services. She began by telling the audience, made up of Novell customers, partners, solutions providers and employees that she appreciated their loyalty. “We will make it worth your while,” she stated. She assured everyone that “Novell is here to stay,”
Ms. O’Keefe then spoke about Novell’s differentiation in the marketplace: its strength in security. Vibe is enterprise-ready because of its security. Vibe is a product that is necessary for the future. The next generation of workers will only work in a collaboration space because that is what they expect. This new workforce will expect tools like Facebook, need to work anytime, anyplace and anywhere and will need a secure way to create and share information freely. That is what Vibe is doing.
She then displayed the roadmap for Novell releases. Here are a few highly anticipated releases:
- GroupWise – the Ascot release is expected mid-2011; Windemere by the end of 2012
- VibeCloud – the Zinc release is expected shortly in early 2011 with a follow-up release, named Unity, coming in late 2011
Ms. O’Keefe then issued a call to action for all attendees and other loyal Novell customers so that we can keep Novell growing and developing.
- Get on GroupWise 8, OES2 on Linux and Zen 11.
- Test drive Vibe, DataSync and FMS.
- Start your Windows 7 migration with Zen.
- Take advantage of upcoming offers to purchase these products.
- Share your story.
Charles Taite, CTO of GWAVA, then spoke, assuring the group of continued community support for Novell products. He illustrated an aggressive release strategy for the GWAVA product line for 2011 and beyond. Some highlights include:
- Today’s release of GWAVA 5 and WASP 2.1. GWAVA 5 includes full support for Windows and built-in reports and statistics.
- GWAVA for Vibe OnPrem is now available as a stand-alone product or integrated with GWAVA 5.
- GWAVA 5.x for cloud services will be released third quarter 2011. Support for Vibe OnPrem and Vibe Cloud will be offered in a single product.
- Reload 3.5 will be shipping March 20 and include speed improvements.
- Redline 3.5 will be released in two weeks and includes 64-bit support, centralized configuration of the monitoring agent as well as online, automatic updates.
- Retain 2.0 is released now and version 2.5 is planned for March 2011.
After an afternoon of focused sessions and a great dinner, attendees at GWAVACon all came together for the annual tradition of Game Night. Planned and executed by Richard Bliss (also known as the Game Whisperer), an epic game of Wings of War broke the world record for the number of players in a single game - 92. Wings of War, a WWI table game, pits the Allies against the Axis pilots in a giant dogfight. Each player maneuvers his or her replica plane to shoot down the enemy until only one side remains airborne.
Tuesday, January 25
On Tuesday, attendees rushed to get to all of the sessions that they could until the conference wrap-up in the afternoon. Information- and food-laden attendees then met together for the last time for a lively session of prize giveaways. Sponsors gave away a lot of great prizes like netbooks, Xboxes, iPods and even a light saber to excited, if tired, attendees. After many shared business cards and promises to return to GWAVACon in Torrance next year, another successful GWAVACon was over.
