The Queen Mary provided an elegant venue for our inaugural IT Service Management Cruise to Excellence on November 29th. The event was enjoyed by over 100 attendees, an internationally renowned group of speakers, and 20 outstanding IT Service Management Vendors. Our GLA-LIG and National itSMF USA event cruise staff  handled the attendees with humor, aplomb and speed.

 
Internationally Renowned Speakers

Speakers for this spectacular event included four ITIL® authors, a Gartner briefing and ITIL® perspectives not available anywhere else. Following Dave Howard’s opening remarks, our keynote speakers, ITIL® author Brian Johnson and Greg Charles, ITSM Practice Executive from CA, brought life to our event.  They were followed by Dave Cannon, ITIL® v3 author from HP and Jay Long, ITSM Practice Executive from Forsythe Consulting.  Our attendees were very pleased with the advanced information presented and the availability of the speakers for personal interaction before and after their presentations.  During the networking event at the end of the day, we captured a picture of four of our presenters as they received their 3-D laser inscribed Queen Mary mementos from Dave Howard and Donna Holt.

The afternoon session opened with Randy Steinberg challenging IT to change, followed by George Spalding addressing continual improvement as a cultural imperative.  Our last session was a Gartner briefing by Paul Webb on ITIL® and "hype cycle."  We then adjourned for some well deserved refreshments, networking and to find out who won the BINGO raffle and vendor raffle prizes.

Vendor Fair

The vendor fair was held in the Grand Salon throughout the day and featured a continental breakfast, lunch and a cocktail party.  During these networking opportunities,   IT Service Management experts were available to share tips and techniques with our attendees.

Some of the winners from our Bingo Card Raffle were:

Staphanie Telander, LA County ISD
William Pandy, Hewlett Packard
Adam Levine, NetworkD
Mark Magruder, Elliott Marks, Inc.
Michal Lesner, Stephen S. Wise Temple
Clifton Pee, Asuza Pacific University

A special thank you to our vendors, who  held their own raffles…over 30 attendees left winners!! CA was our Admiral's Club (Premier) Host.  Pink Elephant and Forsythe Solutions were Captains Table Hosts.  Cruise Director Hosts include in alphabetical order:  Access Group, ASG, AXIOS, Frontrange, IBM, Infra, ITSM Academy, Lontra, Metron-Athene, MiTECH, NetIQ, NetQOS, newScale, Nouri & Assoc., OTRS, Pepperweed, and WGA Consultants.

Our thanks go to Jim Flores for organizing the Vendor Fair which paid for the event,  Dean Nedelman who built the website and Ellie Oh who designed our ads, program guide and website.  Dave Howard did an outstanding job organizing our board to ensure that our inaugural conference was a success.

          Attendees on the Queen Mary 

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