HP Software Universe 2009 drew more than 2,000 attendees from throughout the region, with customers additionally coming from EMEA and APJ. Thank you once again—customers, partners and other members of the HP Software community—for your attendance and contributions at HP Software Universe.

Survey results showed 89% of attendees ranking the event as either "good" or "excellent," and 98% said they would attend HP Software Universe again and 97% said they would recommend the event to a colleague.

Mainstage kicked off the opening morning on Tuesday with Andy Isherwood, VP of HP Software Services, presenting the welcome keynote, The State of IT Today. Andy "set the strategic table" for the event, challenging the room to "seize this leadership moment."
Customer keynote, Betty Smith, vice president of Process and Governance Management, John Hancock, provided a look into how she and her IT team have taken point solutions and extended them across business units within the context of an end-state vision.

We typically invite inspirational speakers to extend our ideas about overcoming limitations. This year could not have been more compelling as Dick Hoyt related the story of Team Hoyt — a father and son team who have completed in Iron Man competitions and other endurance sports events worldwide for the last 30 years.

In addition to Mainstage keynotes, HP executives led two "super sessions" on our BTO and Business Intelligence portfolios. Robin Purohit, vice president and GM of Software Products, painted a broad picture of our BTO portfolio and its new offerings, while a Live-In-Action product team took the audience through a fictitious scenario. Kristina Robinson, vice president and GM of Business Intelligence Solutions (BIS), spoke to customers about the potential for assessing maturity levels in Business Intelligence.

Track Sessions and Roundtables held the attention of our attendees for the remaining two and a half days. We hosted 186 Track Sessions on technical and business topics spanning our BTO and BIS portfolios. Product experts also hosted 100 HP Roundtables, which ran concurrently.

The HP Solution Showcase featured 44 HP demo kiosks in IT Management Strategy, Applications and Operations, as well as business intelligence and information management, and more than 60 partner exhibits. Sixty sponsoring partners included EDS as the executive sponsor and six gold sponsors — Accenture, AlarmPoint Systems, Capgemini, Deloitte, Oracle and SAP.

The Services Zone—a first-ever combined program for Support, Professional Services and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)—held 65 Meet-the-Experts meetings in the front of the Solution Showcase.

HP Software & Solutions Awards of Excellence 2009 announced three companies that demonstrated how leadership and technology combine to achieve breakthrough results:

• Altec, an IT services company and part of the largest financial franchise in Latin America, won in the category of Business Impact with a solution based on HP software to monitor the end-user experience and provide unified end-to-end visibility into banking transactions.
• JetBlue, the New York-based airline, won in the category of Extreme Efficiency, an award recognizing how the company optimized availability and performance in its online reservation system.
• T-Mobile USA won in the category of IT Transformation. Replacing manual, siloed processes with HP software-driven automation and a lifecycle approach, T-Mobile maximized the value of its ERP environment.

Partner Summit was a special session which attracted more than 400 partners on Monday. Partners Arrow and Avnet sponsored the summit, which salutes the importance of partners to our business. Partner Summit Awards were also distributed:

• Partner of the Year awards went to Accenture in the United States; First Contact Software Consultants in Canada; and Tsoft in Latin America.
• Partner Spirit Awards were won by Pegasie Technologies for Canada; OPENTEC for Latin America; and both Genelogix (for BTO) and Comport Consulting (for Information Management) in the United States.
• Spectrum Systems won the Public Sector Partner of the Year award.
• The Highest Growth award went to Intact Technology.
• Partner Solution Offering of the Year went to Infosys Technologies.
• Partner Support Offering of the Year was awarded to Orasi Software.
• Emerging Partner of the Year was Techport Thirteen.
• Recognized with Implementation Partner of the Year awards were: Pepperweed Consulting - Business Service Management; Seamless Technologies - Business Service Automation; Evergreen Systems - IT Service Management; FocusFrame - Applications; and Melillo Consulting - Project and Portfolio Management.
• HP's two software distributors—Arrow and Avnet—both received a special Outstanding Contribution award.