We had a stand at this year’s British Computer Society Configuration Management Group’s annual Tools Fair on June 15th. The Fair was organised by Robert Cowham, a genial chap who knows a lot about Configuration Management. Robert was remarkably calm when we turned up at 7:15 and remained unflustered throughout the day as far as I could see.

The Fair had a small exhibition and talks on two themes:

• Service Management - Topics covering the ITIL framework from the CMDB to the Release management process.
• Application Development Lifecycle - Topics covering vendor products and services that enable users to actively manage application code throughout its lifecycle.

About 100 people turned up on the day and my impression was that the bulk of them were interested in the Application Development Life Cycle theme.

There were a couple of hours of breaks throughout the day and this meant there was a steady stream of visitors to our stand. The rest of the day was spent talking with the other exhibitors, introducing ourselves to those who hadn’t met us, and showing them pure::variants if they hadn’t already seen it.

One interesting point that arose from these discussions was a general agreement that there are very few good quality software tool exhibitions in the UK at present - the Tools Fair being one of them. This has been our impression for some time and probably reflects an increasing expectation (certainly in our industry) that all essential product information, including demonstrations and downloads should be available from the web. Do let us know if there is anything else you’d like to see on our website.