IOD Press Conference: A Trillion Networked Things (Including Cows)

I'm currently in the IOD 2009 press conference. IBM Software general manager Steve Mills has already taken the stage and made his opening comments, and currently speaking is Frank Kern, VP of IBM's General Business Consulting group.

The picture they're painting has a backdrop, the "backgrounder" if you will:

By 2010, there will be a billion transistors per person and a trillion networked things -- cars, roads, pipelines, appliances, pharmaceuticals, even livestock.

Get along, little dogie. We'll find you wherever on the range you may roam!

The volume of information created by those interactions is driving businesses to use information as a tool for making smarter and faster decisions and, in turn, gaining a competitive edge.

Even for the cows (if you've seen the Chick Filet billboards, you know that's important).

The key to unlocking the value of all this information lies in developing an information strategy that makes use of business analytics and other information management for technologies, for smarter, faster decision-making.

But according to a recent IBM survey of nearly 300 clients, 1 in 3 business leaders frequently make critical decisions without the information they need.

Sifting through massive amounts of paperwork to get any process to the finish line is costing businesses millions of dollars.

And in IBM's recent Global CIO Study, 83 percent of respondents identified business intelligence and analytics as a priority.

Hence IBM's numerous investments and announcements in the business analytics space, including today's.

In April, IBM launched a Business Analytics and Optimization services practice that draws on the company's expertise in vertical industries, research, math, and information management.

New Analytics Solutions Centers have already opened in New York City, Tokyo, and Beijing... and Frank Kern announced in today's press conference that new centers would be opening in Washington, D.C. (focusing on cyber) and London (focusing on financial).

And, probably most importantly, since 2006, IBM has established relationships with more than 15,000 clients and 2,300 new business partners, helping them bring Information on Demand offerings to market more quickly and around the globe.

About a quarter of the nearly 100 acquisitions IBM has made since 1995 directly support the company's Information Management portfolio.

Read more about today's announcements here, and if you'd like to learn more, download the IBM Business Analytics and Optimization press kit here.

You can also read more about smart intelligence in action, in ReadWriteWeb's blog post about the soon-to-be-demo'd IBM Food Traceability iPhone App, "Breadcrumbs," which can help consumers with smarter in-store food shopping by giving them detailed information about grocery items (including info on product recalls!).

Speaking of ReadWriteWeb, their own Alex Williams just asked a question about the real-time Web (seeming to nod to social media-like data), to which Deepak Advani, IBM VP Predictive Analytics, replied that IBM has technology to help deal with the real-time Web but that such analysis should be done in a larger context (leveraging other information sources/stores).

OK, I'm blowing this Popsicle stand for parts beyond, as I have some information of my own I need to go integrate.