Pattern Finder

Business Travel--Ya Gotta Love It

Or not.

Burton Group called a management meeting in Salt Lake City this week, so today (Sunday) I flew out to Salt Lake City from Boston. That meant I got to:

• Get up at 2 AM so that I could get showered, dressed, and help my wife shovel the driveway with 3" of snow on it.
• Leave the house at 3:45 AM to get to Logan Airport at 4:30 AM. (Route 93 was snow covered--we're into Day Two of a weekend snowstorm--and the speed limit was around 30 MPH.)
• Stand in the snail-paced security line for half an hour. It had a Business Traveler lane that wasn't open, so I got to enjoy the bedlam of the Family lane.
• Sit on the tarmac for two hours waiting for the plane to be de-iced. (The plane was scheduled to take off at 6:30 AM; it took off at 8:30 AM.)
• Sit in the seat in front of the toddler from Hell, named Maggie, who spent most of the two hours on the tarmac screaming at the top of her lungs phrases such as "I can't see!" (when she wanted to look out the window) or "Ow!" or "Wah!" Based on her parents' blase conversation during the entire escapade, it's clear they didn't care about the impact of Maggie's screeching on others, and in fact felt she was expressing her individuality. Happily, once we got into the air, Maggie slept.
• Take a ride on Express Shuttle from the airport to downtown, commanded by a driver who pocketed my $10 at the beginning of the $8 ride without giving me change and then hustled me out of the van at the hotel, no doubt hoping I'd forget that he owed me $2. (His ploy didn't work.) 
• Arrive in a room that the front desk assured me had a refrigerator and extra feather pillows, but didn't. (However, to be fair, they were delivered two hours later, interrupting my nap.)

Yup. Business travel--ya gotta love it.

If This Is Friday, It Must Be Manchester

Late Thursday evening I flew into Manchester, England from London. Adventures I had after landing included:

• Being on a bus in the middle of nowhere with the rental car nowhere to be seen. (A scene very similar to the rental car scene in the movie, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. An absolute classic starring Steve Martin and John Candy. If you haven't seen it, you should, especially at this time of year, as it takes place the day before Thanksgiving.)
• Once I'd found the car rental office and the car, driving around the rental car carpark about three times before figuring out how to get out of it. (They'd hidden the Exit signs really well.)
• Overshooting the hotel by about five miles due to initially entering the wrong address in the GPS.(I don't function too well when I'm tired, and by then I'd been up for 20 hours.)

Today, after two meetings in the Manchester area, the Burton Group sales rep and I drove down the M1 to London, where I'll stay over the weekend before flying out on Monday.

By the way, in my Wednesday post I mentioned that Swissair had prevented me from bringing one of my two bags onto an Airbus 320 as carry on because it was too heavy--necessary due to "security reasons." Yet on Thursday, I boarded an Airbus 320 run by British Airways with both bags as carry on and didn't hear a peep about it.

If This Is Thursday, It Must Be Basel

I was in Basel, Switzerland today, and saw the beautiful Town Hall and the square in front of it. An especially nice surprise was that workers had just finished putting up a large Christmas tree within the Town Hall courtyard, and it was very pretty.

Earlier this week, when someone found out that I was traveling in Europe, sent me an e-mail along the lines of, "That must be very exciting." Here's some of the excitement I had:

• I ran to make the train from Basel to Zurich Flughafen (Zurich Airport), and when I got within 6 feet of the door it pulled away (I made the next train).
• However, that cut things a little close. I made my flight to London Heathrow with 10 minutes to spare, and I was the last passenger able to cram my luggage into the overhead bins.
• I inadvertently left my backpack at the security inspection point, and by the time I realized what I'd done and went back to get it, you could tell the security staff were starting to think there was a bomb in it (even though they'd just scanned it and passed it).
• My flight from Heathrow to Manchester was delayed for an hour; when it did arrive, BMI instantly announced that it was "In the final boarding process." The group of bedraggled passengers went to go to Gate 8, but the door to the gate wing was locked, since it was past the official closing time of Terminal 1. Happily a cleaner came along, opened the door, and we propped it open so we could get to the plane. An access alarm went off shortly after I walked away.
• I got to my hotel room at 1 AM.

There's some excitement I could do without.

If This Is Wednesday, It Must Be Zurich

I flew from Amsterdam to Zurich this morning. It was an interesting trip in several ways.

First, SwissAir told me I couldn't bring on one of my two carry-on bags because it was too heavy--9.2 kilos instead of the limit of 8.0 kilos per bag ("Due to security," said the gate agent. I'm like, "Huh?"). So I checked it--in other words, the total weight of my luggage on the plane didn't go down. Yet I'd carried that same bag as carry-on on the flight from Boston to Amsterdam. I suppose it could be related to the airplane, since they probably don't want to overload the overhead bins--this one was an Airbus 320, and the flight from Boston was a larger airplane--but it may just have been an airline peculiarity. It will be interesting to see if British Airways and British Midlands say the same thing in the next several days.

Second, the noise on the plane was incredible--to the point where it was hard to hear the safety announcements--because a bunch of passengers at the back of the plane didn't stop talking the entire flight. They were all businessmen--with a few businesswomen sprinkled in--who got on the plane in groups of two or three, and spent the entire time socializing. It was very similar to what you see on commuter rail trains, where groups of people sit together every day and talk about a variety of topics for the entire trip. And once the plane landed, they continued to stand and talk, even after everyone in front of them had left the plane. Certainly not the behavior I'm used to seeing in the States, where businesspeople, even if they're together, stop talking to each other after awhile, whip out their laptops, and read e-mails or work on a document. They also sit at the front so they can get off quickly.

If This Is Tuesday, It Must Be the SaaS Conference in Rotterdam

Today I was in Rotterdam, where I discussed the roadmap and vision of SaaS at the first European SaaS Conference. I must admit that as I was putting the presentation together several months ago I was a bit stumped on how to talk about the SaaS roadmap--it sort of wanders all over the place, with different applications arriving at different times. For example, SaaS-based web conferencing and SaaS-based web analytics came out in 1995 and 1996, and so have now been around for over a decade, while SaaS-based document sharing solutions arrived only several years ago. All of a sudden, it came to me--while the destinations were all over the place, the roads weren't. I needed to describe the roads themselves: the map of roads. Once I thought of the problem that way, it became very clear. There are three stages of roads:

• Gravel Road: 1993-1999--During this time, hardy pioneers were blazing new trails--startups were looking for a way to break into a market and SaaS (called ASP at the time) was an attention-grabbing hook. Meanwhile, on the customer side, enterprise departments were looking for a software alternative. However, there were no real customization/configuration capabilities.
• Highway: 2000-2006--At this point, SaaS started to go mainstream. Departments (e.g., HR, Sales, Marketing) began using SaaS because sometimes it was a better solution than software and they could buy it faster than software. At the same time, the vendor attitude of "You can have any color you want as long as it's black" attitude started to soften, with suppliers starting to allow some customization via configuration settings.
• Superhighway: 2007+--Today, SaaS is accepted as a delivery model and being exploited. Large vendors are buying up SaaS providers and enterprises are starting to look at migrating significant portions of their business to SaaS (e.g., e-mail). Also, SaaS is now being viewed as a platform.

The conference had some big players in attendance--IBM, Iron Mountain, KPMG, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com were there; Google was supposed to present, but backed out at the last minute.

TSA Theatre

I flew out to San Francisco yesterday from Boston to attend Oracle's OpenWorld Conference, and got to see some "TSA theatre" in action. I had put all my liquids and gels in the required 1 quart bag, and one of the screeners saw that one of the items was saline solution for my contact lenses.

"That's over the limit!" she yelled. "That's a 4 ounce container and you're only allowed 3 ounces." I started to explain that the TSA regulations on the TSA Web site said a 4 oz. container of saline solution was OK as long as you declared it (probably because a lot of people wear contact lenses and you can't buy a 3 oz. container from any supplier). But before I could get started she said with a huge wave of imperiousness, "But I'll check with my superior to see if he'll make an exception," implying that she was doing me a huge favor, as opposed to following the rules as written. After about three minutes -- I'd made it through the screening by then -- she returned announcing, "Well, he made an exception this time," darkly hinting that I'd better not try it again. I pointed out that there hadn't been any similar histronics when I flew out of Logan last week, and she said, "I can't imagine why they allowed that."

Last week I sat with a woman on the flight back from Minneapolis and she'd had her cosmetics confiscated. She'd packed them in her checked baggage on the way out and hadn't really thought about gathering them together on the flight back. She did have the quart bag, but had few things in it. There was plenty of room in the quart bag for her cosmetics, but TSA wouldn't allow them to transfer them to it. She'd turned up with an almost empty plastic bag and she wasn't going to pull any last minute shennigans on TSA, no sirree.

I do get riled by episodes like this, but then I think, "Still, it's cheaper than going to see Robin Williams perform." You've just got to stand back and enjoy the show.