The last few days have been completely exhausting, and there are still three more days of the conference. As part of my deal with PerformanceG2, I’ll be posting more details of the conference on their blog. They should be up soon here.

Like last year I’ve had a lot of fun going to the various booths at the expo and hearing what people have to offer. Pens and other toys are just bonus.

An extremely interesting technology is coming from Servergy. They make extremely cool running, low power servers. Their big selling point is the savings you’d get on electricity bills from powering the servers, to the air conditioners you wouldn’t need. Their demo unit, running at 100% CPU, showed 0.56 amps. I am by no means a hardware guy, but this all seemed very very impressive, and I suspect a few of my clients may be interested in learning more.

An Ernst and Young reps chatted with me about the importance of Forensice Data Analytics – fraud identification and prevention. http://www.ey.com/

Fusion-io is offering a flash adapter for System X. From what I understand, it will cache a database in memory, providing significant performance improvements. http://www.fusionio.com/

Esri was giving out their latest map book, and I was lucky enough to snag one of the last ones they had. GIS has always fascinated me, and the book shows their maps are as much art as informative.

I visited a few IBM booths. IBM consistently and regularly blows me away with the new tools they’re developing. End users now can build complex statistical models with only a few clicks, there is software that will send alerts when it detects imminent infrastructure failure, natural language recognition that will automatically search through data sets to try to answer your questions.

There were a few other technology vendors I spoke with, but unfortunately those guys didn’t have any documentation handy! Guys, with all the flashing lights of the Expo, make sure I have some papers to remind me what you’re all doing! (I did manage to score a hat from PerformanceG2’s arch nemesis, but I won’t mention their name since I don’t want to upset my wonderful hosts).

Did I miss anyone? Are there any groups I should make a special effort to visit? The expo is open until Thursday, so drop a comment and I’ll make a special visit.