First off, stepping out of the airport in Phoenix was like stepping into a blast furnace. And I was coming from Dallas, which is not exactly cool this time of year. At a high of 114 and seemingly well over 100 from sunrise to sunset, it was hot in Phoenix! Never mind that stuff about dry heat. Fortunately, we were kept busy and focused in the briefing room.

My fellow attendees were Alec Sharp, Barry Devlin, Beth Gold-Bernstein, Bill Inmon, Claudia Imhoff, Clive Finkelstein, David Loshin, David McGoveran, Gwen Thomas, Jan Henderyckx, John Ladley, John Zachman, Jos van Dongen, Ram Krishnan, Lyndsay Wise, Mark Madsen, Mike Ferguson, Nancy Williams, Peter Aiken, Richard Hackathorn, Rick van der Lans, Shawn Rogers and Stan Locke.

The international flavor of the attendees was evident, as was the strong pedigree of knowledge. I owe a great deal to many of them. Thanks especially to Rick van der Lans for organizing this compact, minimal-fluff education event.

For the speakers, please forgive us for our incessant short-attention span behavior as we typed away while you spoke. It was mostly note taking. There was some detail gathering and cross-checking on the internet and chatting on same in real-time. There were lots of questions and challenges of the speakers, which made for a lively event. (Note to self: forgive this behavior in your classes!)

Some of the questions were about the gap between the vendor's products and successful implementations of information management, which naturally incorporate stewardship, data quality, governance, metadata, architecture, methodology, process, etc. Vendors are not to be faulted for the lack of such things in their products. These are mostly best practices that people have to add to the product implementations. Vendors can be faulted however if their products are incompatible with these practices and, as is more common, if the products are sold downplaying the need (i.e., as the "silver bullet").

I think it is somewhat interesting the vendors who chose to attend and present to us. It indicates a confidence in their product sets technically and an eagerness to get the word out. I won't repeat their marketing messages. I've hyperlinked the vendor names below and, at their websites, you can find a lot of that information. I will break out my observations of the vendors into other blog entries.

Vendors: BusinessObjects/SAP, Information Builders, Composite Software, Serena Software, Informatica, Progress, Microsoft, Teradata, Datallegro, Corizon, Lumigent, Kalido, Hewlett-Packard, Pervasive Software, Dataupia and Ingres Corporation.

Technorati tags: Business Intelligence, Independent Analyst Platform