Fun and Misadventure at IBM BPEC Miami in 1993
Meeting Alligators and Lou Gerstner
Last month I wrote about how studying Enterprise Innovation at Waikato University created opportunities for me. There were many. One of these was with IBM.
In my role as manager of the Systems Division at Monaco, I was given free rein to grow my division with new products and agencies. We were a distributor of premium brands that didn’t have their own branches or offices in New Zealand. That’s me on the right when I had hair, well at least a little a Windows CE Cassiopeia, one of the first handheld computers running a Microsoft operating system.
IBM was looking for a distributor for a new POS product called The Sure One. It was a mid-range system targeted at reasonably large retail chains. It didn’t fit with their core business model of high-end systems for department stores and big supermarkets.
They put out an RFI and I responded, using all the tools and knowledge I had freshly gained at Waikato Uni. Not only did I win the distribution rights for New Zealand and Australia, they told me that mine was the most professional bid they had seen worldwide. I was pretty chuffed with that. That came with some rewards.
We were appointed as IBM Business Partners and I was invited to go to the annual global Business Partner conference (BPEC), which in 1993 was in Miami, Florida. They would pay for the entire trip and with a bit of a push agreed to cover all the costs for my Aussie compatriot as well.
I haven’t been able to lay my hands on any photos from that trip, so I may have to come back and add those at some stage because it was a great trip. I was on the road again.
My first stop was Chicago for the amazing FMI Conference. This was always an amazing conference, which sadly is no longer held in the windy city. The Food Marketing Institute had everything from every dish you could possibly imagine, to restaurant equipment and of course everything Point of Sale, and I was eyeing up an agency for Elo Touch Screens.
I definitely took photos, because I remember one that I took of someone I took to be a chef, who had the physique of the British cartoon character Billy Bunter. This rotund fellow was walking around the food hall area of the exhibition tasting samples of new food products. He had his conference satchel over his shoulder, 3 sample plates nestled in the crook of one arm as he was reaching for a sample from yet another food manufacturer. It would have been worthy of a fee from Getty if I could have got a model release, which I was afraid to ask for.
It was winter and while the sun was shining, there was a fierce cold wind coming in from the lake. This was my first visit to Chicago. The next one would be filled with blues and would feature memorable experiences such as sitting down to eat buffalo wings with Phil Guy, a legend in his own right, and the brother of the famous blues guitarist, Buddy Guy.
From there I flew to Miami, where it seems it is always summer, for BPEC, which was an amazing experience. BPEC is HUGE and as soon as I arrived at the airport, there were people there to greet us. I was put in a taxi to the Miami Marriott and Marina in Biscayne Bay, which turned out to be very impressive, and expensive. Fortunately, IBM was picking up the tab.
For the first day it was all about entertainment, and entertaining it was! We had a meeting room for the Kiwi contingent and this was my first chance to catch up with my Account Manager and the rest of the IBM resellers who had flown in together from Auckland.
It was here that I met Trevor and Corallie Eagle, of Eagle Technology for the first time. Trevor was a keen yachtie and had represented New Zealand in the 1950 British Empire Games as a swimmer. He had a special treat in store for the men. The women were going to go shopping for the day, also hosted.
Trevor had a keen sense of humor and before the women left, he made a point of pulling a huge roll of American $100 bills out of his jacket pocket. Being a Kiwi rich-lister, this was no ‘Chinese wad’. You know, the kind where someone has a roll that looks like a huge amount of money, but only a few on the outside are real notes. These notes were real, so this would have contained a good $5,000. As we stood around, he peeled off just two of the notes, and carefully handed them to Corallie, telling her to buy herself something nice, winking at us for good measure. Clearly, she would have had a platinum card and the gesture was just a joke.
Off we went in a couple of stretch limousines to a marina, where it turned out we were going to spend the day sailing with the New Zealand Admiral’s Cup team that was training in the Florida Keys. The team included America’s Cup legends Brad Butterworth and Russel Coutts who would go on to win the America’s Cup in San Diego two years later. I got to go to another BPEC there as well, which merits its own post, because thanks in part to one of my team, Rowan Savage, we were taken to a private dining room after he gloatingly asked the Club Captain how it felt to lose the cup (more than once), as we walked past the then empty trophy cabinet.
Anyway, we arrived at the marina and waited at a locked iron gate, surrounded in razor wire, while Trevor called Brad on his mobile, to come and meet us, to escort us to the yacht we would sail on for the day. Sadly, Trevor passed away 7 years later while entertaining on his yacht at Motuihe Island in 2000 at the young age of 68. I feel honored to have been able to take a couple of overseas trips with him.
So back to the marina. We were pretty excited about going sailing with such a famous crew. One of our people, I’ll call him Richard, because that was his name, and probably what his mother called him when he did something a little silly, stood at the very edge of the deck of the marina to pull open the big metal gate. It opened a bit quicker than he expected and as he was about to meet a yachting hero, he was unceremoniously dumped into the sea. We did our best not to laugh too much, but he did bear the brunt of a few jokes as he dried out.
It was a great day on the water. I’m gutted I can’t find any of the photos I took from that trip, because we all had selfies with the team, and it was an excellent adventure. The crew were great hosts, told us lots of stories, and we all had turns at the helm.
The next couple of days were business. It started with the opening address by none other than CEO Lou Gerstner. Being a go-getter, I was seated 9 rows from the front, the first row that wasn’t reserved seating, and listened with interest to his plans to bring IBM into the new world of computing, in an age when mainframes were being replaced with networks of mini and laptop computers. I got to shake his hand, although there were much more important people for him to converse with. I’ll take the memory.
There were banquets and entertainment in the evenings and there was the launch of the IBM Sure One, the reason I was there. Back in New Zealand, I offered the product range to my franchised Casio dealers and with the help of IBM, we installed our first retail chain, Placemakers a national hardware DIY company, with our POS networks.
For the New Zealand launch, I put together a brew of beer with the assistance of my friend and marketing guru Richard Gee, to add to the fun. Maybe in hindsight, the bottles should have been blue, but then I didn’t ask for IBM’s approval to do this, my bad.
I think I still might have one or two bottles of this beverage which will have long since gone off.
My Aussie offsiders and I still had a couple of days off before they would fly home, and I flew on to the Netherlands to meet with Scantech, another new agency I had picked up that manufactured barcode readers. The incumbent distributor had been trying to get me to take over so he could retire, and there were a few unique products, like this price checking scanner that I wanted.
On the first day, we went on a cruise, going around the backyards of the rich and famous. We didn’t get close enough to see anyone, but we cruised past homes belonging to people like Jimmy Buffet, Jennifer Lopez, and one of my wife’s favorites, Gloria Estefan.
When we returned, we went to South Beach with a couple of guys we met at the conference who had a rental car. It was super busy and we had to give the car keys to guys who did valet parking along Ocean Drive, hoping we would see the car again. We walked to the beach which was quiet and unimpressive. It was a Monday, so I guess a lot of people were back at work.
Again, I so regret not having been able to find any photos. On our last day, four of us decided we couldn’t leave Miami without going on an airboat ride in the Everglades.
We tried a couple of places but we hadn’t arrived within the designated time slots for tourist trips. At the third place, we got the same news, “sorry the last boat has gone for the day.” We told them we had come all the way from Downunder, and after assuring them that we were Kiwis, not Australians, who weren’t so popular there, one of the staff said he was finishing for the day and would be happy to take us out on his personal airboat.
Now the boats the tourists go on, have a couple of rows of seats, and afford a bit of confidence, with radios, compass, and safety gear, that not much can go wrong. But this boat was more like the boat a little Ron Howard went out on in the 1970s TV series Gentle Ben. We were undeterred and didn’t know what we didn’t know.
So three of us went on this little boat, with a roaring V8 engine and a huge fan, through reeds that in places towered over our heads. We raced off and within seconds had no idea of direction or bearing. That was OK because obviously, the skipper knew what he was doing, after all, he was alive…..
After about 15 minutes of deafening noise, pushing the grasses down at the bow and watching them bounce back up behind us, the skipper shut off the engine. He asked if we wanted to see some alligators, which of course we did. So he tossed out some burly to attract them, and pretty soon there were a few alligator heads nosing up to our craft to see what was on offer.
It felt like it might be us being offered on the banquet table. The skipper coaxed one over to the bow of the boat and gently put his foot on the alligator’s head! At this stage, it is fair to say we were bricking ourselves. All the alligator had to do was snap and drag the guy into the water and we were in serious trouble, perhaps not as much as he would be, but to put it in perspective, all we could see around us was water and grasses. We had no idea which direction would bring us back. In one direction it was only a 15-20 minute trip. But if we got it wrong, the area known as the Glades is roughly 160km long and 97km wide, and full of more hungry alligators. This was causing us a little anxiety, much to the skipper’s amusement.
After a couple of what we thought were foolhardy but successful attempts to scare us, we convinced the skipper that we had been sufficiently entertained, and while we were keen to continue touring, would he be so kind as to keep his body appendages inside the deck area of the craft.
Our airboat was maybe double the size of this one but was smaller and closer to the surface than those licensed for passengers.
Anyway, I’m here to tell the story, so it ended well. It was a wonderful trip, thanks to IBM’s hospitality. We continued with the product for a few more years, long enough to go to BPEC San Diego, although I had to do a deal on that one. IBM paid for the accommodation, but Monaco had to pay for the airfares. We had some great adventures on that trip too. But that’s another story. The product turned out to be very unreliable as well, also another story. Eventually, the range was dropped, recalled and customers were refunded their investment. The story is that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, but in this case, there were better investments.
