Hursley 50th celebrations with added metaverse

This week has seen the official part of the IBM Hursley 50th anniversary celebrations. To mark the occasion we have had 3 days of visitors to little country estate in Hampshire, with a mix of presentations and expo’s of all the things that are done here.
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We had a visit from John Denham, Secretary of State for innovation, university and skills which involved a tour around the entire site expo.
We then had a day of customer visitors, featuring some presentations, expo walk arounds and presentations in the new Innovation Centre here in Hursley (which needs a post of its own!)
The next day saw members of the press, including TV crews come and do some interviews and see the show.
That ended the visits but we then ran the expo for the 3,000 employees on site to come and talk.
The really cool thing for us here at eightbar was our position in both the expo and on the schedule of speakers. Rob had the stand up and running with lots of people drawn to and interested in the nice innovation award, unity3d, metaverse, opensim etc. I helped out there when I could, but I had lots of 1:1 interviews and conversations to do as well as presenting my usual Virtual Worlds pitch.
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So there I was nestled admist the Lab Director, Chief Executive and Distinguished Engineers spreading the word about eightbar and metaverses.
It was also important as it belnds with what Hursley already does. Hursley is the home of messaging and of transaction processing. As you saw from the recent post we are very much implementing MQ pub/sub messaging across our CIO projects in various virtual worlds to achieve a different level of interoperability. Gordy and I also have a patent filed on transaction processing. Bear in mind CICS (which runs many of the transactions many of you make daily in banking) is 30 40 years old. So CICS still has relevance in dealing with complex transactions in a virtual world too.
The food was pretty good to at the events.
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I include this photo becuase a fellow IBMer said “I suppose that will end up on the internet?” erm… yes 🙂
Also we dont just turn up at these things, lots of extra effort goes into it. Rob’s posters are a prime example, representing all of Emerging Tech here in Hursley.
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The mobile and pervasive piece bottom left was not clipart, but planned by rob in a photo shoot having collected lots of mobiles from us and from Dave’s office. Planned, photographed, built into a poster, sent for printing and mounting, put up and then explained for 4 days by Rob, Bharat(pervasive) and Jules(cloud).

So I wonder what the new kid on the block that mucles its way onto the agenda will be in 50 years time?

2 thoughts on “Hursley 50th celebrations with added metaverse

  1. CICS only a mere 30 years old!? I’m sure it’ll be delighted that you consider it so young, when you turn up at it’s fortieth birthday party this year ;-).

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