Glag-Consult GmbH

Information On Demand 2009 - Impressions in brief

After my return from the IBM Information On Demand 2009 conference in Las Vegas I'm back at a customer site and try to make the solutions as "On Demand" as possible.

But first things first.

Despite the currently tough economic times the conference was well attended. IBM reports on their web site more than 6'000 attendees, slightly less that at last years' conference. Different to previous conferences, IBM set the scope of this conference purely on data management. Practically nothing about WebSphere or Tivoli. Although data management is a major playing ground (or battle field?) in IT, it does not represent the whole software stack upon which information systems are built. Next, Green IT, the new buzzword in IT, seems to mean that everyone is supposed to download presentations from the web one by one. Does this really save energy as opposed to producing and distributing a DVD? I'm not so sure.

Presented by Ambuj Goyal, General Manager of the Business Analytics and Process Optimization and Arvind Krishna, General Manager of IBM’s Information Management Software Division, IBM goes one step further on its On Demand and SOA journey. Up to now IBM explained their vision by the primary goal of aligning IT capabilities with the Business requirements along with a technology based on open standards. Business ideally defines its requirements based on business goals, and IT provides what is needed. Does this sound familiar to you? Sometimes yes, but in many cases there is still a long way to go. Enhancing the daily operations of an enterprise was the primary scope of this vision. How do we achieve this? Major activities and initiatives include componentization of applications, integration of data buried in silos, definition of services with a business meaning, enhanced reuse of services, and combination of these services into business processes, aka choreography. Everything based on an information architecture where ON Demand represents the business part and SOA provides the technical infrastructure based on open standards.

With the annoncement of October, 2, 2009 IBM acquired SPSS, a leader in predictive analysis. Cognos, who has also been an industry leader in Business intelligence, has been acquired before by IBM. With both acquisitions, IBM strengthens its competency in BI and expands the On Demand and SOA vision to Business Intelligence. This is underlined by the fact that Ambuj Goyal has taken over the high scale role as General Manager of the Business Analytics and Process Optimization in IBM Software Group.

I'd like to close with some remarks about non technical stuff. No big names on the networking party, but a pleasure to listen to a very professional and vivid band. And finally, this time I had a very comfortable flight home from Los Angeles to Zurich with Swiss LX 041 (UA 8601) on 28-Oct-2009. Once in a lifetime it seems to me that you can also have the perfect seating in Economy class with plenty of space for your legs; I highly recommend seats 30A or 30B on the A340.

Want to know more? Give me a phone call in Switzerland at +41-79-787'78'22.