The last day of Management World started off with some bad news. It turns out that our catalyst did not win the Excellence Award, instead it was for another project that BT sponsored.

I did try my damnedest to verify that we had won before posting, but the TMForum’s Twitter feed was no help and the web site just had the BT logo and not the name of the project listed for the winner. The executive who accepted the award referenced us and the BT employees in the booth thought we had won as well.

One funny thing is that because of this misunderstanding, the booth saw a tremendous amount of extra traffic as everyone else thought we were the winner, too. I guess it worked out that it wasn’t sorted until the last day.

For the most part I enjoyed the conference, and the term “cloud” was used correctly most of the time. I also got to spend time with Alex Finger, one of the people we worked with at Swisscom to deploy a large OpenNMS solution.

He had an interesting blog post on the misuse of the term “cloud” from none other than HP. They wrote:

By utilising Cloud Computing your mobile device will become your photo ID, your passport, your library card … and it probably won’t be called a phone anymore …

No, no, no, no … by utilizing “the Internet” your mobile device blah blah blah. The Internet is not the Cloud, despite Microsoft and their Visio icon. Everyone is so desperate to be associated with cloud computing that they will use it whenever possible, although it has a specific meaning.

In our catalyst at the show we demonstrated an integration where extra computing power was turned on and off based on need. That’s cloud computing – treating traditional network resources as if they were utilities.

As Alex points out, hardware companies like HP desperately want to be associated with cloud because “If the service and the computing power are not visible anymore to the users … who cares then about the hardware vendor?”

Good point.