Green Hills Software Hosts 2010 Elite User Technology Summit

What happened?

Green Hills Software (GHS) hosted their 2010 Elite User Technology Summit last week in Santa Barbara, California. The summit included a number of customer and partner presentations, open forum discussions, and one-on-one meetings covering a broad range of applications over a period of two days.

VDC’s Views

Attending this conference was a difficult decision for VDC. Do we stay in Boston, cold Boston, during the month of December or accept Greens Hills Software invitation to attend the summit in Santa Barbara, CA?  The toughest part of the decision was convincing my wife that this trip was work related, especially after she Bing’d the Four Seasons Biltmore Resort and Spa hotel on the web where the summit was held.

What impressed me about this technology summit was that it truly was about their customers and partners, a meeting of embedded experts, with GHS providing only two presentations – both of them at the start of each day. So this summit was much different than prior years’ conferences where GHS conducted most if not all of the presentations. And yes, the theme of the conference was centered on safety, security, and the use of virtualization – but predominantly from the customer’s perspective.

Customer presentations covered a number of applications and technologies and spoke to past experiences, challenges, and successes and often included recommendations to GHS for future enhancements to their technologies – operating systems, development tools, etc. Here’s a sample of the discussions that took place: CENELEC Certification, High Speed Printing systems, Implementation of Open Standards Middleware, Application Porting, Software for Medical Devices, and others.

From our perspective, these are the type of meetings that bring together suppliers, customers and partners in ways that are often difficult to measure but clearly build trusted relationships and result in open and often frank discussions on future technology needs. It certainly was an interesting experience to be a fly on the wall as one of a few industry analysts and editors to participate and listen in. Our recommendation to GHS – continue to develop and meet with customer councils or groups (or whatever you want to call them) that could be industry and/or technology specific. Listen to issues and future requirements, interact with sharing technology roadmaps, and engage in ways to ensure the future success of your customers.

When I went out early this morning to get the paper it was snowing. I thought back on last week and my time in Santa Barbara and the warmer weather and smiled knowing that I cheated Mother Nature and Boston out of two cold days in December.