On Friday, 25-Feb-2011, I attended LCTY 2011 at ebf.de in Cologne. ebf is an IBM Premium Partner for many years and they also work together with RIM. So it is no surprise that they offer solutions for the Blackberry and other mobile devices.

The venue was the IBM building in Cologne near the river Rhine. The slogan was “Go social, do (mobile) business”.

Ed Brill was not able to speak at this LCTY because of some overlap with other LCTY events in Germany. So this year there were no “high rank” speakers from the US to present a session in Cologne.

But ebf got Dr. Peter Schuett as the keynote speaker. Dr. Schuett is the leader of Software Strategy & Knowledge Management in the IBM Software Group.He has great presentation skills so even for me as a Lotus Notes tekkie his presentation was not boring at any time although it was all about strategy.

There were all the now well known topics in his talk; Lotus Live Symphonie, Activity Streams etc. The fazit for me ( putting my administrator hat on ) is that we have to aggravate our efforts in the mobile business. More and more content will be available on the mobile device. And there is another important point that comes into play. BYOD ( Bring Your Own Device ). More and more companies allow their employees to use own devices at work. So from the company’s perspective you will no longer be able to handle only one mobile device technologie in the future. You have to lookk for solutions to get the content onto different  end-point devices ( Nokia, Blackberry (PlayBook) , iPhone/iPad ).

Putting my developer hat on, the message clearly is “Learn XPages. If you have not started, do it NOW !!”.

Device management is also a big topic, IT departments have to deal with. Looking at all the different devices and the inconsistency in security and the lack of features in remote wipe and also billing, you should think about a device management solution that tries to simplify the handling of different device types.

MobileIron is the solution that was presented at LCTY. It is not feature perfect. Some features like the billing for iPhone/ iPad are not available. But this is caused by iOS.

So even the device vendors have to do some work to put all the features into their operation systems to allow a consistant way of handling different end-point devices in the future.

To sum up this event. A free event, perfect location, excellent catering. Keep in mind that ebf does not provide much technical content in the sense of code samples and stuff. The target audience is decision makers and managers. Maybe Marco can comment on this :).

One sidenote on presentations in general. Most of the presentations were original slide decks from LS 2011. These sessions are meant to be held in 45 – 60 minutes. It is irritating for the audience when you try to present a 45 minute session in 30 minutes and skip some slides from the presentation because they may not be important from the speakers perspective.

Let the audience decide, which slide contains important information from their point of view and not simply skip a slide because of time pressure.