Thoughts on IBM's IOD 2009 Conference

Returned from two days at IBM's Information On Demand (iod2009) conference in Las Vegas and was quite impressed by a variety of things. Among them:

• The Smart Archiving initiative that brings together a variety of technologies from various groups around the company to offer the most comprehensive approach to content archiving that I have seen to date.
• The focus on content analytics across a wide range of areas. In the context of archiving, for example, IBM's Content Analyzer can scan file servers and other data sources for information and provide deep analytics to determine what needs to be archived as a precursor to the archiving process itself. An important feature of this is the ability to analyze content from a variety of structured and unstructured information types to find patterns, anomalies, etc. in the data.
• A significant commitment to cloud computing across virtually every area in the company.
• Some interesting approaches that are being taken to expanding the uptake of LotusLive, as well as some new capabilities that will be introduced in 2010.

Plus, the conference was very well attended and seemed at least as crowded as last year's, if not more so - always a good sign for any large conference.