In December Ronny, David and I went to TM forum Digital disruption in San Jose. OpenNMS has been involved in the TM Forum for many years but this was the first time we had taken a stand at the show. We have always had a bit of a love/hate relationship with the TM Forum because from a business perspective it is hard to justify the membership based upon the natural demographic of our customers.
The TM Forum have traditionally only addressed the needs of Telecoms service providers but as the industry has been converging, they have realised the need to expand their membership to included wider IT/Web industry players.
This change in focus is potentially very good for OpenNMS since we have made a lot of headway in the wider IT space but have found it difficult to penetrate Telecoms. As part of their efforts to consciously move from the Telco space into the wider Cloud/IT/Web infrastructure providers market the TM Forum have moved their North American show to Silicon Valley in order to attract this audience. We wanted to use the show to demonstrate the new STUI display and features of OpenNMS 14 which were particularly interesting to a cloud provider.
Evaluation
We have quite a large number of fairly senior decision makers to the stand but unfortunately the worst storm to hit San Francisco in 4 years happened half through the week and most of the delegates left early !!. Overall I think the show was worthwhile but given the footfall on the stand, I think the project could have had better value for the money we spent. In future I think if we continue to engage with the TM Forum the most cost effective way will be to participate in catalysts rather than take a stand. Catalysts are real projects in which we can demonstrate OpenNMS technology along side other vendors equipment and systems. I think overall it is a better window for OpenNMS than just a stand.
STUI
If you want to know more about STUI, see the youtube video which David Hustace has created here.