Monday 23 February 2009

Live In Action - statue style

I am not sure what Pivotal’s definition of Live in Action is but it is a bit different than mine.

I have just watched the Pivotal 6.0 Live In Action—Sysmex Shows Off Their Solution webcast, recorded on Wednesday, and now available for all those who are interested. “Live In Action” it is not.

My idea of “Live Action” is not PowerPoint slides. I could forgive this if they had an interesting and powerful speaker, but, in my opinion, Don Patulo, is not. There is nothing new in the slides they showed, nothing that made me to think “Wow – I have to implement that, it was cool”. Sorry, Don, but my attention span lasted 20 minutes, even though the webcast is an hour long.

I am not sure who the intending audience was for this demonstration. Existing customer? Customers who are currently migrating? Potential Pivotal clients? What I do know is that the first 2 groups would not get an awful lot out of the presentation. There was no incentive to upgrade in there, no “Feck me, that is worth the pain of the upgrade”. Potential clients were not given a good demonstration of the capabilities of Pivotal 6.

I think this is negative publicity, especially for people who are evaluating Pivotal versus other products. Where was the live demo of a working system? Where was the awesome real-time connectivity to other systems such as SAP etc? Where is the pretty SharePoint portals made with something more than Pivotal graphs?

I remember seeing a demo of a customers system as part of the series of webcasts before Pivotal 6 was released, which was Live Action, was pretty (lots of SharePoint portals made with a decent reporting tool), had dynamic content in the forms and was a kick in the arse for me to try this stuff for myself. I finished the session with a list of things to try out and ideas for nice features that our users would love.

I came out of this demo wanting to write a grumpy piece for the blog.

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