‘Win Big’ was the theme at this year’s IBM Information on Demand event in Las Vegas, which saw over 13,000 attendees crowd the city’s Mandalay Bay resort for five days.
It was a rather apt theme given where the conference was held, and also the content – which focused on big data and the advantages to be gained from the proper extraction & analysis (analytics) of this mass of data we now have available to us in business.
The event kicked off on this note as IBM made several big data and analytics-based product announcements, including ‘IBM SmartCloud Analytics – Predictive Insights’ and an ‘Information Governance Dashboard’. You can read about these announcements in full on the IBM website.
Photo thanks to Twitter user @hollybarnett
The ‘star’ attraction of the show came in the form of world tennis No.1 Serena Williams, who was interviewed and spoke about how IBM-driven big data & analytics has helped her sporting success. Williams provided some candid insights into her ‘business’ and the content was well-appreciated by attendees who reacted positively in social networks. The full interview is in the tail-end of this video from the event website.
Our team at the event reported back that the key message for attendees from IOD 2013 was about the analysis of big data, and how to effectively respond to the learnings from big data.’From data to decisions’ is a nice catchphrase for this concept and it’s a widely-used term in the current drive to provide big data analysis. In addition there was also a lot of discussion on mobile, cloud, business intelligence and predictive analytics.
For us at Lexmark it was a fitting key message as we were there to showcase our large-scale document processing solution, which is not only about efficient processing, but real-time visibility and management, data extraction, and handling multiple processes on one central platform. Particularly relevant for insurance companies, healthcare providers, banks and other financial institutions, our solution is a practical example of taking control of huge volumes of inbound information and being able to understand, manage and learn from it.
Given that our solution is all about analyzing big data, it was very appropriate that our Senior Director of XBOUND Business Process Automation, John Craig, had an opportunity to present a session on day two of the event, which detailed how ReadSoft, in partnership IBM, have a leading solution for large-scale automation. (John’s session was titled: ‘Mastering Control of Business-Critical Document Processes with Lexmark & IBM.’) In this John highlighted the case of German insurance company Techniker Krankenkasse, and how our digital mailroom solution helps them handle around 100,000 documents every day with ease. It truly is a remarkable setup.
For more reading on key takeaways and sessions from IBM IOD 2013, I recommend this blog from IBM employee James Kobielus, who nicely wrapped the first and second days of the event, as well as providing an overall ‘takeaways’ piece. You can read James’ work here.
If you like quotes as takeaways, then here’s a nice post on 15 quotes from IOD 2013. The only notable omission from that list was this quote: “If it fits in a spreadsheet it’s not big data,” – wise words from IBM’s Chief Scientist Jeff Jonas.
It was a pleasure to meet many existing and potential customers at IOD 2013, and if you have any questions about our large scale solution don’t hesitate to get in touch!