big blue is watching you

I often mix business and pleasure trips. This weekend I had to pass by my parents in law in Rome, but I took the opportunity to pass by a customer of us.

Now this customer has asked us to migrate 300+ ETL jobs written in IBM Datastage (the product IBM bought from Ascential, remember) to Pentaho Data Integration. In other words, the customer didn't want to pay a >100k€ license cost if they could get the same (or more :-), if you ask me ) functionality for free (or at 10% of the cost adding the Pentaho support subscription) from open source ETL software.

So I'm on a late plane flight, booked a hotel somewhere between the airport and our customer. What's the first thing I see when I enter the Marriot hotel:


Now can someone tell me what the chances are that some one who's one his way to discuss the suppression of IBM Datastage for a customer ends up in the middle of a BI convention of IBM, full of Datastage experts and nerds.


For a moment I thought they were on to us, I mean, really, what are the chances ?? But then again, we all know Big Blue isn't watching. They are using most of their revenue from BI on expensive sales conferences to keep those customers hooked.

A pitty I arrived late and was tired, I might have gained a few customers :-)))