Well, last week was a busy, but fantastic week. My travels started on Monday afternoon with a non-stop flight from the chilly air of Minneapolis to John F. Kennedy International in New York. Actually, I was surprised how fast the flight went, and after a few short hours I was programming the rental car’s GPS and heading into Manhattan.

It’s been 20 years since I was last there, and though the skyline might have been tragically altered forever, the hustle and bustle of the city that never sleeps is the same. I came to the United States in the summer of 1988 as a British foreign exchange student, and one of my most vivid memories is of being in New York City at night, and riding a tour bus across one of the bridges into Manhattan. It was one of the most spectacular nighttime skyline views that I had ever seen. As an amateur photographer, one of my personal goals of this trip was to try to recreate that view, and I was able to work my way down to the water line and get this photo.

New York Skyline

My work agenda started on Tuesday morning with a visit to a customer on Long Island. We had a great discussion regarding the ways they were using several of the PowerTech tools to help administer and audit access from users that normally would be hard to control, such as programmers. We also talked about how they see their developing security requirements.

After a 90-minute car-ferry ride from Port Jefferson, NY to Bridgeport, CT, it was a short hop down to Norwalk to meet my first user group. The group had selected the topic of “7 Habits of Highly Secure Organizations” and, for a couple of hours, we enjoyed dinner and interacted about the subject of auditing, access control, and regulations and policy. I raffled away a Starbucks gift card, as well as a number of free t-shirts, and it was a great evening.

Wednesday was a pretty easy day, riding the ferry back to Long Island, and then navigating to the location of the Long Island user group. I was met with a fantastic turnout from a crowd of very active System i users. The group started the evening early with some PHP training led by one of their own members, and there was a fun slideshow on some System i/iSeries/AS/400 history. I presented the “Top 10 Security Vulnerabilities,” based on data extracted from our annual security study. I really enjoyed interacting with this group, which included several of my own customers, as they had lots of great questions and discussion points. After another gift card drawing and distribution of a big box of t-shirts, I was off to my next stop in Morris Plains, NJ.

As a side note, if you are not from the East Coast, a GPS is a prerequisite to navigate your way around a city as large as this. Although mine had some trouble acquiring a signal at times (ahhh! technology) and wanted to send me in circles, I managed to successfully navigate the 90 or so miles to my destination.

Thursday morning begin early with another customer visit to a great customer of Help/Systems and now a new PowerTech customer. I learned about some of the challenges that they had faced trying to implement an object security infrastructure. I offered some advice and also offered the PowerTech services team to provide assistance if desired. After all, as I have stated in my blog several times, we are not just a software company.

Thursday evening had me in Fairfield, NJ, at my final user group meeting. I spent several hours with another lively crowd of about 30 people who learned about the dangers of “FTP, ODBC, and Remote Command.” I included a small demo of how simple it is to access corporate data through common tools, and the conversation was very active, which is typical after people see just how easy it can be. I cleared out my final box of t-shirts, handed out my last gift card, and headed the 90 miles to Philadelphia.

I wanted to use this travel opportunity to visit with another (very well-known) customer on Friday morning. They are an active user of several of our security tools, and are evaluating another one to add to the suite. I spent a couple of hours learning about how they are implementing security in their environment, as well as identifying areas where we can provide some relief.

This is one of my favorite types of work. Meeting with customers to discuss their successes and future needs, and also mingling with the types of user groups that I used be an attendee at in my past jobs. These are the folks that are the diehards of the technology on which our software runs. You don’t have to sell them on the attributes of the System i (or AS/400, as many still call it), and their biggest complaint is that it is not more prevalent than it is.

I want to thank the customers who took time from their busy schedules to meet with me, and also the three user groups that invited me to present to their membership. At the request of a number of people, I am looking forward to returning to the area in the future—to meet with the user groups again as they support the local ‘i’ community, and to host our IBM i security workshop.

I am finalizing this blog entry on Friday afternoon, while awaiting my return flight from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After a brief return to Minneapolis, I leave again to head to St. Louis, Missouri, to teach a security workshop, and give a user group presentation in Jefferson City.

Interestingly, although I added “ferry” to the list of my various modes of transportation used last week, I still have yet to use a train!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 10:04 am and is filed under Events, News, Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.