LAS VEGAS
– IBM Corp. held its annual Information on Demand (IOD) conference in
Las Vegas this week where the event focused on unlocking the business
value of information. While there, here are just some things seen and
heard:
1. This year’s IBM IOD conference in Las Vegas drew more than 7,000 registered attendees from more than 70 countries.
2.
At the opening keynote, IBM general manager of information management
software, Ambuj Goyal joked that IOD stands for “Information Obsession
Disorder” because “we are certainly obsessed with information and this
conference is about re-dedicating and re-energizing our obsession with
information.”
3.
Comedian and actor Martin Short opened the conference keynote with a
burst of merry song. He later returned to the stage several times
throughout the opening session to tell jokes and belt out yet more
songs.
4.
IBM boasted 10,000 new clients, 2,000 new business partners, and a 20
per cent CAGR (compound annual growth rate) since the launch of its IOD
strategy almost three years ago.
5.
Since launching its IOD strategy, IBM has surpassed the one billion
dollars in investments it said it would make incrementally. “We pretty
much ran through that first billion dollars in under six months. We
will invest many billions of dollars more,” Steve Mills, IBM’s senior
vice-president and group executive, told the press. The company
currently counts “many millions of dollars” in acquisitions, and has
also focused on organic development and brought in “a few thousand
more” partners, said Mills.
6.
Since the acquisition of Cognos was closed at the end of the first
quarter of 2008, IBM has put out some 40 new deliverables that are
Cognos-based, and is focused on real-time analytics. Mills told the
press that “it’s not just about having a lot of [data]” but about
having the necessary data, being able to analyze it on the fly and
using it to make business decisions.
7.
This era of computing lacks a name, according to Mills: “We’re almost
near the end of this decade… there’s no name for this era of
computing.” The bar has been raised and the world, said Mills, is now
in “an extreme era of computing”. So business’ infrastructure choices
will matter and they will have to understand [those] business needs and
the “high-velocity nature of what you’re going to be implementing over
the course of the next decade.”
8.
Current economic conditions could have been avoided with real-time
analytics, Mills told the audience at the keynote. “More data, more
information, but more importantly real-time effective focused analytics
that would have helped them understand aspects of financial risk and
insight into what was happening to them as it was happening,” said
Mills. “It could have been a powerful tool for dealing with the
problems they were facing years ago and could have avoided the
incredible hole that we’ve dug for ourselves.”
9.
IBM leads 7 out of 11 smart metre deployments globally with the goal of
building intelligence into utilities to lower costs to the customer.
10. Conference staff gave out to attendees an IOD version of the For Dummies line of fun educational books entitled Information on Demand for Dummies.
The attendees can probably do without the remedial reading that the
limited-edition 66-page booklet aims to give, but it just might come in
handy, the company said.
11.
Real-time data analysis can benefit food shipment supply chains, too,
and reduce the lengthy travel times that produce is often subject to,
Mills told the press. “[Produce] travelling hundreds of miles before it
gets to the supermarket, carrots going over 1,200 miles. No wonder they
don’t taste like carrots.”
Also at IBM IOD:
Bank of Montreal spends time on data governance
IBM services to help build competency centres
