The day started with the keynote kickoffs on this first day of the IOD conference. And I have been here three days already?

IOD Grand Opening by Ambuj Goyal, General Manager of Business Analytics and Process Optimization. Ambuj started by saying that attendance is up over last year, despite the recession. He remarked that this year's gold sponsor of IOD is Intel and then reflected that the last several years the gold sponsors were acquired and now are part of IBM, such as FileNet and Cognos. Did he suggest that IBM will be acquiring Intel? Ambuj introduced Arvind Krishna as the new General Manager of Info Mgt Solutions, as described in a previous blog.

Frank Kern, SVP of Global Business Services, followed by getting an understanding and business justification to "Information-Lead Transformation" theme. What does it take to create deep predictive analytics? ...to reduce uncertainty in our decisions? The dilemma is that we have more information than ever before, but less trusted information is available, and radically less real-time information. Frank shared the example of the NYC Fire Department. They are monitoring conditions in 8,000 buildings. They feel that their mission should be not the fighting of fires, but the elimination of fires totally! By using analytics to predict which buildings have a high probability of a fire, they can take preventive measures. Frank ended with a quote by Robert Kennedy who borrowed from George Bernard Shaw, "Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never and say why not.

Frank then invited a customer panel onto the stage, consisting of Shirley Lady of BlueCross BlueShield Association, Nihad Aytaman of Elie Taharl Ltd, and Debbie Oshman of Chevron. Great discussion but wished they would have gone deeper into the specifics. Nihad made the point the small (SMB) companies can have BI with only one BI person!

IBM Smart Analytics System (ISAS) by Bill O'Connell, IBM Distinguished Engineer of Data Warehousing and CTO. Bill has a tough job of juggling dozens of technologies spread across dozens of products, with new technologies being added monthly through acquisitions. He started with an overview of the recent announced IBM Smart Analytics System (ISAS). From customer forums, Bill remarked that most customers want to build their own systems and avoid packages. In other words, most customers want the ability to customize their solutions, rather than predefined appliances. Hence, ISAS is a highly customizable packaging of a full-stack BI system. We went through the options available. For the smaller predefined packages, IBM has built and inventory those systems to assure two-week delivery. Also, InfoSphere Balanced Warehouse has evolved into ISAS since the former can be obtained by unchecking certain options.  The rest of the briefing was under NDA.

From a discussion of SSD (solid-state disk) implications, an question that I asked was why not just increase main memory. Why continue the traditional distinction between main memory and external storage? Bill reminder me that main memory is good-olde volatile RAM while SSD is slower and cheaper non-volatile flash memory. Hence, the traditional distinction will continue.