We started 4.5 solid days of briefings. My seat will be quite warm and my rear quite sore this week! The saving grace is that IBM's best and greatest will be in front of our group!

IBM Optim by Al Smith, Director of Optim Engineering. Excellent informative update. Understanding the entire data management life cycle from design to create, classify, subset, mask, archive, access, migrate, and finally dispose...across all systems and applications in an enterprise architecture. Optim will be the heterogeneous solution from IBM to support all facets of data life cycle. Discussed future products and direction under NDA. One general (and insightful) diagram is the business value of information across its life cycle, as shown here.

IBM Software Strategy and Architecture by Jim Caldwell, Director of IBM Technical Strategy. Their objective is "to provide next generation open integration platform built on SOA" to "build a smarter planet". Jim focused on how IBM Software group supports industry solutions as a middleware platform vendor (as opposed to an application vendor). IBM refers to their offering as an "industry framework" consisting of data definitions, code for common scenarios, data adapters to move data among components (possibly from other vendors), foundational services like security, auditing, logging. Examples are: Service Provider Delivery Environment for telco, and Solution Architecture Framework for Energy for utilities. Out world is becoming Instrumented; our world is becoming interconnected; and all things becoming intelligent. Diagram shows what it means to be smarter, as shown here.

Nice reception afterward. A chance to renew old friendships...  Thus, ends Day One. Need rest for tomorrow.