At xMatters we have three technical teams that fill different roles in working with clients:

Advisors - analysts and architect types who steer clients towards the relevance engines that will help their business

Consultants - the crew with the skills that put the meat on skeleton deployment plans and bring relevance engines to life

Client Assistants - if you're got questions, they have answers.  this is the group that provides support for everyone who uses relevance engines, even xPerts.

There is a fourth group of technical folks who work with our clients. Internally known as they "veeps" they include the VPs of operations, product management, and technical evangelism.

Under normal circumstances, they're all on friendly terms, helping each other out as needed to ensure that all 1000 of of our clients have the best possible experience in working with us as a company.  That is, until you pit them against each other in competition.  That's when the gloves come off, all bets are off, and comments like "there can be only one" start to get thrown around.

So here's what's up:

We're having a slightly less friendly version of the 5-5-5 days that our Engineering team runs where the 4 technical groups will face off against each other on Friday November-18 in an epic battle to see who can build the best special purpose relevance engines.  Will they be focused on IT major incident management? Service impact alerting?  Management updates? Coordinating activiites at an airport?  Who knows!

Bookmark this blog post to keep up to date leading up to, and on the day of, "The Throwdown".  The winning team gets prizes and grudging acknowledgement that they are the best of the best.  The losers get booed until the voices of the winners are hoarse.

Share your thoughts on who will win, or ideas for relevance engines as comments on this post.

May the best team win!