In-Depth Tutorials and Vendor Fair Under Consideration for U2 University 2008; UniData 7.2 Soon to be Released in Beta

IBM's U2 group is considering changes to this year's U2 University based on the success of last year's events as well as customer and partner feedback. “I can tell you that we have not had such accolades from the customer over anything else we have done in recent history. It is like it has reinvigorated the customer base to have that much information delivered,” Susie Siegesmund, director, U2 Data Services, IBM Information Management, told DBTA. “A lot of people said they would come next year but they would make sure more people from their organization came as well because it was so valuable.”

Among the changes, said Siegesmund, “is that we are planning to offer some tutorials - likely some fairly detailed ones - on the day before the actual U2U starts and maybe the morning - because our format was to start at noon. We were specifically asked for that,” said Siegesmund. Some customers, for example, "were not using our Web services tools and didn't understand how they could take a UniBasic subroutine and wrapper it and turn it into a Web service. The existence of that and why they would do it was educational for customers,” said Siegesmund of feedback to last year's U2U. In-depth tutorials this year would enable customers to take “a deep dive” on a subject such as this and offer step by step information, explained Siegesmund. Additionally, some regular sessions may be revamped to be more hands-on, she added.

“We have the new System Builder XA product that will be out at the end of Q2 of this year. SBXA is SystemBuilder Extensible Architecture. It basically replaces the two-piece product of SystemBuilder Runtime and a SystemBuilder Client with a more tightly integrated product that leverages Windows Vista,” Siegesmund said. “How you would get from where you are today to where you can go with that product will be something we obviously will have some very dedicated sessions on,” she added.

A vendor fair is also being considered for U2 University this year, possibly to be held over one day or two evenings. “Last year, we had multiple vendors who sell products that layer onto the U2 products asking us if they could have a booth,” said Siegesmund, explaining that was not possible because space was very limited. “This year, we are going to look to having that.”

U2 University will be held in two locations in the U.S., on the east and west coasts, as well as one location in Europe and one in Australia. More details are expected to available soon.

According to Siegesmund, UniData 7.2 is going to beta this month. Key features of UniData 7.2 include encryption of data at rest; the EDA (external database access) API; online resize (a Unix only feature); replication enhancements; U2 Developer; as well as an extensible admin tool. With this release, “I really think we are doing a lot for the customer in terms of security, high availability and manageability of data servers,” Siegesmund told 5 Minute Briefing.

IBM's U2 group started the Early Adopter Program (EAP) to allow customers an opportunity to provide feedback before a product reaches code freeze. “We’ve had two EAP releases for UniData 7.2. The first included most of the functionality for data encryption, while the second added more features of data encryption along with the U2 Developer. Resize online is such a big project that it won’t be available until the beta release.” For more information about IBM's U2 product family, go here. www.ibm.com/software/u2