Last Monday, I took the last flight into New York for a 10am meeting on Tuesday with a customer in Manhattan. That meant that I got into the hotel at about 1am . After checking in, I got into the elevator with two other women who looked like they were just coming from a big party. They were going to the 14th floor. I was going to the 19th floor.

As the door closes, one of them asks me if I'm working and I tell them I'm just getting in from Puerto Rico. They ask me if I'm alone, and I'm like "yes...". As the elevator's door opens on the 14th floor she says "well, if you want to have some fun come down to 14th and we'll be here sexy". "Well, that's a first", I thought. I smiled back, the door closed and I went to get some needed sleep.

The next day, I got to the customer site and to my surprise, the CIO was in the meeting (I thought it was just going to be IT people). As usual, I asked for their expectations. To this the CIO said:

"I've heard/read all the press out of the Enterprise 2.0 conference and want to know what it takes to get Lotus Connections going"

I thought: "Are you kidding me ? !! The customer is already sold!!! What am I even doing here?? ". The CIO continued: "We are a multi-national holding company with multiple subsidiaries. Each subsidiary has its own LDAP/user directory. Can we use Lotus Connections Profiles to aggregate the data?"

Ah, an opportunity for our Tivoli folks, which happens almost every time we talk about Lotus Connections Profiles. I talked about TDI and TIM (Tivoli Identity Manager). I also mentioned what I've done for customers in terms of aggregating data. Specifically, I mentioned a customer I recently worked with where they loaded some data from an LDAP server, some data from a SQL database, and some data from a CSV file.

After the 2 hr meeting was done, the customer asked for pricing information and next steps from IBM to get rolling! Too easy!

Tech Sales folks: Keep sending your customers to the press about the Microsoft fiasco at Enterprise 2.0. It's generating leads for Lotus Connections and bascially selling itself!!

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