That was quite an experience! Doing 20 blogs in 3 days about the one-hour presentations delivered by 18 BI/DW vendors. The 'real-time' blogging has the advantage of focusing your attention, but it has the disadvantage of reducing your ability to reflect on and analyze the content. The result is that the blogs often had a 'vendor hype' tint to them. Perhaps I can do better next time...

What stood out? The presentations where the CTO (or equivalent) cuts out the marketing pitch and clearly tells what was happening internally, who was pushing the limits, and where there were gaps. Several vendors displayed this candor. Most unfortunately did not. Some notable highlights were:

+ Composite Software with their Discovery Appliance. David Besemer gave an insighful demo.
+ Progress Software with their latest SOA offerings. Hub Vandervoort and his pipes and side-pipes.
+ Kalido with their metadata mgt. Bill Hewitt and Robert Dickson did well with a tough concept to motivate and demonstrate.
+ HP with Neoview. The one-liners from Greg Battas cut to the chase.
+ Dataupia with Satori Server. John O'Brien sliced and diced thru the architecture.

Rick van der Lans did a super job herding us cats and bringing all the logistics together. For a glimpse at the cast of characters, view our homemade video that congratulated Rick on the event.

My blogs about IAP are collected here.

There was definitely synergism flowing among this group of 'independent' analysts. If you are an analyst with similar interests, please contact us. The analysts attending are:

Peter Aiken, VCU & Data Blueprint
Barry Devlin, 9sight Consulting
Jos van Dongen, Tholis Consulting
Clive Finkelstein, Information Engineering Services
Mike Ferguson, Intelligent Business Strategies
Beth Gold-Bernstein, ebizQ
Richard Hackathorn, Bolder Technology
Jan Henderychx, Brainware
Claudia Imhoff, Intelligent Solutions
Bill Inmon, Inmon Data Systems
Krish Krishnan, Sixth Sense
John Ladley, IMCue Solutions
Rick van der Lans, R20 Consultancy
Stan Locke, Zachman Framework Associates
David Loshin , Knowledge Integrity
Mark Madsen, Third Nature
David McGovern, Alternative Technologies
William McKnight, Conversion Services International
Shawn Rogers, Powell Media
Alec Sharp, Clariteq Systems Consulting
Gwen Thomas, Data Governance Institute
Nancy Williams, DecisionPath Consulting
Lyndsay Wise, WiseAnalytics
John Zachman, Zachman International