Send your developers to JAX!

Last month I, and a number of developers from IBM's Hursley labs, went to JAX London; I'm delighted to say that we were a gold sponsor this year. I was going to write about the conference before but sadly I didn't get to see (m)any of the sessions because I was responsible for  the IBM demo area and spent most of my time talking to people about what IBM does with OSGi.

In between talking to people, my view of the conference was mainly looking at the other sponsor's stands. So, here are some observations based on what I saw:

1. This is a great UK conference to sponsor if you want to reach Java developers.
2. The busiest stands were the ones that had tools demos and/or were able to sell interesting stories about  work that they were involved in - or they were hiring :-)

If you are going to sponsor a developer conference, which I strongly recommend,  send your developers to run the stand....or at least your tech sales people. Don't send the salesmen. Seriously, no-one will walk away from this conference with a bunch of orders - you won't close a sale here. The aim is inspire people with a vision of how working with you and your products will make their life easier, more profitable and more fun (in a tech sort of way) - that message will get back to the people with hard cash. Trust me.

Here's my favourite image  from the conference - taken at about 19:00 by a slightly wobbly photographer - I have appropriated the Microsft stand - which was looking a little lonely.

By the way, I am a recovering Windows user - I've been free for nearly three years now, so it took me several beers to get this close....