Altinity were exhibiting at LinuxWorld in London last week. It was our first show and went really well. There were lots of people there and we got to chat to a large number of them.
Some people said that the show was smaller than previous years, but we found it busy. The larger companies (Oracle, Novell, IBM, HP) seemed like they had smaller stands, but this gave more space for the smaller organisations, like us!
We had a lot of interest. We paid for an advert in the official programme and had a great position. Our stand consisted of two flat panel screens: one with a rotating slideshow of Opsview's main features, with a 2nd for demonstration purposes. This was James' idea and it worked really well.
We decided against a live internet connection, because it was prohibitively expensive, so we had to create an entire little network for monitoring. Our best demo was pulling a little cable out of the Mac Mini we had on the front and seeing an SNMP trap raised into Opsview.
There were demo failures, of course. Our main Ubuntu server sporadically hung whenever we shut it away. In the end, we left the server hanging out - it was probably an airflow or cable issue somewhere. Also, the power kept being cut off on our row of stands. This caused one of our mysql tables to be corrupt, which we only noticed when we tried to display a web page. Sigh.
The biggest draw seemed to be the fact that we plastered Nagios across our stand. We had sought permission from Ethan and he was happy to grant, so we put a couple of posters up and we were also giving away 5 copies of Wolfgang Barth's Nagios book. It was amazing the number of people that were walking past, stopped and said "We use Nagios. What's Opsview?". We had a great story to tell around here, so we were happy enough to explain what we did. This just proves the point I was making at NagConf in my talk - use the Nagios brand to enhance your own reputation by "playing nicely" in this space.
It was interesting to find out which organisations had Nagios installed. We met some people from local governments, media companies, hosting companies, consultancies and telecoms. Some had really mature Nagios setups (distributed environments, automated updates of config files), some were just starting out. There were lots in the middle who liked Nagios, got it working and haven't touched it since, because it just keeps working away. We didn't mind who we talked to - another company to add to the Nagios user base is fine by us.
I only got to meet Ben Clewett from the mailing list, though he doesn't hang around there much recently. Hari Sekhon says he was there, but wandered pass, thinking we were "just another reseller". Damn, better do better next time...
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