Sunday was the big meet and greet at the IOD. I arrived a bit late, but made it in time to meet some of the other bloggers at a special influencers sessions. They were talking about ways of more efficiently publicizing messages with tags. It was great fun, and I had the pleasure of meeting several IBMers that I’ve only communicated with via email. Shouts out to Crysta and Delaney. Unfortunately, due to a combination of flying forever and jet lag, I was a zombie for most of the day, and I can scarcely remember what I’m supposed to do. Something about hashtagging #iod2012? So ##iod2012? This twitter stuff is very confusing.

I had the great pleasure of having a hands-on session with one of the SPSS Support guys. The SPSS tool seems phenomenal. It actually seems somewhat comparable to Transformer in that you don’t need to know statistics to build a decent model, but if you did you could build something amazing. Like Transformer you can pull from multiple data sources, including Cognos. It can dump the results of the model into a table for later reporting needs.

There are some very interesting companies with booths at the expo. The ones that stuck out in my mind (remember, zombie – can’t remember everything) provide some interesting technology solutions.

There’s one that has a system to monitor social media real time. You can set certain keywords as red flags, and have them pop up a warning real time when an employee or a customer posts that to any of the social media sites. The example I was given was “guarantee”; if a bank employee would write something like “we guarantee a 5% interest rate on your savings plan” on to twitter, the message would be captures before it goes out for review. The same system would also allow a dedicated employee to reply instantly to unhappy customers. I cannot, for the life of me, remember the company name (remember, I was delirious with fatigue at the time). They are having a session on Tuesday, but I’ll try to snag a company card before then.

Another interesting company (Seclore) provides a wrapper for files. Excel, PDF, whatever. In order to open any of these files you would need to install their application. Each time an attempt is made to open one of these encrypted files, a request is sent to the main server for permission. The server then sends back a command allowing or disallowing access to the file. It will track the usage of all encrypted file and report back to the main server. It even allows the file owner, or the administrator, control to delete files remotely.

The IOD is being held in the Mandalay Bay in Vegas. If you have never been there, a word of advice. Do not wear uncomfortable shoes. Just walking from the hotel room to the event center is a long walk. Also, despite what you may have heard about IBMers always wearing black suits with black ties, apparently it’s not true any more. Business casual is the word of the day. So the lesson is, wear comfortable walking shoes, and you can leave the three piece suit at home. Unless you like wearing suits that is.

So my plan for today is to pass some certification tests (85% discount for attendees!), and to attend some of the sessions. If you’re here and want to chat, I’ll be the suit wandering around in the really uncomfortable shoes. Remember, if you want to buy me a drink scotch (or bourbon or whisky or whiskey or sour mash or rye) will never go wrong or unappreciated.