Share in the Fun With IBM

NEW YORK -- Share Inc., the IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) user group, will hold its 49th annual meeting next week here in New York City.

Though they'll look very much the same as the Republicans in town the following week, these business-class IBM specialists will be there to hear two keynote speakers opine on R&D and p-Series servers, as well as attend several educational sessions, officials say.

In true IBM style, the company is already busy unannouncing products in the days before the show. Share officials wrote in a recent email to reporters and analysts that "IBM will make a new product announcement on its Virtualization Engine Suite for Servers during the Share User Events [emphasis added]. They will make this announcement during a session, tentatively scheduled for Tuesday, August 17 [at 11:00 a.m.] The general availability of the system's services will be announced."

However, when contacted by NDCF, IBM proclaimed the "product announcement" a typo, a communication error, a screw up, a boggle, a bungle, a goof… Session # 6225 is simply an educational session about the virtualization engine technology that was announced back in April, IBM says.

Anyway…The Share conference tracks are grouped into nine categories: applications systems, data, distributed systems, enterprise IT management, Linux and VM, MVS, networking, Share-wide, and systems management. Just for fun, match the following actual sessions with the categories you think they belong in, using the message board below:

Less adventurous attendees may find more mundane sessions of interest, such as session 1842, "What's New in IBM Mainframe Software Pricing." [Ed. note: Wild guess -- it's going up?]

Keep reading NDCF for more Share Inc. news. We must be going now. Our (virtual) marmot is sick.

— Evan Koblentz, Senior Editor, Next-Gen Data Center Forum