I’m in Taipei since Saturday noon. I attended Trend Micro’s PaJaMa 2009 conference held at the Sunworld Dynasty Hotel Taipei. PaJaMa 2009 – The Smart Protection Network Conference’s tagline was “Be the light that brings the rainbow” and I am sharing some of my personal insights and experience here in my blog.
What is PaJaMa conference? It’s not a sleepover party OK? It is a conference for Trend Micro Product Managers, Project Managers, Product Development Group (PDG) members and related engineering and support teams. Attendees discussed some of Trend Micro’s top secret projects 🙂 (OK not so secret already since Trend Micro Smart Protection Network (SPN) is making waves out there in the cloud security scene 🙂 ). The first PaJaMa meeting I attended was the one in Manila (way back 2004 I think) when I was still a new process/project manager. We were given real pajamas to wear in the evening and we had one great party at the poolside of Shangri-la Edsa (oh me is reminiscing 😀 ). Why PaJaMa? I guess the word “PaJaMa” was derived from the initials of PM (Product Manager) and JM (Project Manager) which includes majority of the attendees. This is also the probable reason why the letters P, J and M are capitalized in the PaJaMa word.
On the first day our CEO Eva Chen delivered the Keynote Speech. Then our CTO Raimund Genes discussed the Trend Micro SPN history and overview. Other Trend Micro Executives and Architects (John Maddison, Charlie Lee, and YC Chen to mention a few) did several presentations and live demos related to Trend Micro SPN. In the afternoon we had some workshop focusing on integrating different core modules. I was a little bit nervous (and excited too), because my group assigned me as the Group/Table Presenter for our mini-MRD/PRD. Good thing the organizers did some drawing of lots and our group was not lucky enough to be chosen to present that afternoon.
PaJaMa Party is not geek stuff all day. In the evening of Day 1 we had dinner and party at Outback Steak House. We had live band performing; some beer drinking competitions between teams and a lots of dancing too.
During the second day, we had more presentations, live demos and an extension of the 1st day’s workshop sessions. Before the conference ended, the engineering team and the organizers gave out some commendations (Best Supportability/Serviceability Award, Best Localization Award and Best IT/SLA Award) to product teams. You can check out the winners from my tweets here (and read the next 4 tweets too)
All throughout the two days I’m shaking hands and chatting with colleagues from all over the world: fellow PMs, JMs, Product Developments Group (PDG) members, Core Technology and AntiMalware Group team mates, Service Engineer Group (SEG) members, Global Support Team members and other sub teams. Most of them I have the chance to work together on some projects (previous and ongoing ones); some I have exchanged e-mails before but just met in person for the very the first time, and honesty I feel great that I can finally match the name (and email address) with a face. To sum it up it’s like I’m going to run for the local 2010 elections ?
To all PaJaMa 2009 attendees, I hope you enjoyed the conference like I did. I also wish that I can be part of next PaJaMa Conference.