Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Manchester Rules!

I had a 9am meeting in the IBM Manchester office this morning which meant I drove up last night in order to be on top form. I've done the getting up at 5am thing, driven for 4 hours and then presented for an hour and it isn't worth it. You just end up wired.

So I stayed at the Holiday Inn Express in Salford Quays. Quite a nice hotel and the view over Manchester at night from my 6th floor room was amazing. Not least because the Theatre of Dreams, Manchester United's Old Trafford stadium was directly outside my window. Quality. In the morning when it got light I was really impressed at the amount of regeneration that has gone on in the area. It really was quite classy.

As it happens, my hour long presentation over ran quite a lot. I ended up speaking for two and a half hours because the customers were asking so many questions. I love it when customers drive the briefing so they end up getting what they want to know rather than me delivering a bland marketing message. At the end, one of the customers said, "So now I get it, you don't have to chose between Domino and IBM Workplace, Domino IS Workplace and if you stick with Domino you are already part of Workplace anyway." Absolutely - I took that comment as a job well done. (And in the spirit of collaboration, it wasn't just me - I did the Domino bit and my frolleagues Andy Walter and Ed "Biggles" Cawthorne did the Workplace bit)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You could have stayed with me Ports.
Phill

Mr Ports said...

Thanks for the offer Phill, maybe I'll take you up on this next time I'm in Manchester :-)