With a combination of statements about present trends, a vision for the future and some interactive, live demos, Jim talked about "the art of the possible" and made the case for a new approach spanning "traditional BI" and "mission critical analytics". He discussed Netezza's family of streaming analytic appliances in a vision fulfilled by Netezza's work with partners and others in the broader Netezza Community.

The live demos spanned scoring, geospatial and image analysis and Jim's demo even managed to help nab the "culprit" of SPUBox-gate, catching Bobby "White Shoes" Doyle in the act of making off with a SPUBox (more on them later) - as you can see in the above three clippings from video that captured the act in progress. Nearly all of them came off without a hitch and the audience was treated to a bit of just what is possible with streaming analytics.

Following Jim, was VP of Technology, Michael Sporer with his presentation of technology direction and how it may impact Netezza's product portfolio direction in the days ahead. Michael provided the perspective of the keystone hardware, software and networking technologies and innovations on which Netezza relies, what their relative potential was for advancement over the next several years and the influence we anticipate them having not only on Netezza's product direction, but more importantly on emancipation and dissemination of advanced analytics from the cloistered sanctum of the data center to the edges of the enterprise.

Most of the remainder of Tuesday was filled with business and technical track sessions, provided by Netezza customers, partners and employees. But a room that received a lot of attention throughout the day on Tuesday and into Wednesday was the Netezza Developer Network (NDN) showcase. The showcase, with its ten SPUBoxes suspended from neo-industrial scaffolding, was transformed from a store of potential energy around streaming analytics in the early morning hours to a bustling center of kinetic activity and energy by noon. Attendees to the conference were able to see, first-hand some of the ideas and applications that are part of the Netezza Developer Network spanning ten different functioning demonstrations.

After the morning general sessions had concluded, we spent the bulk of the remainder of the day in business and technical track sessions. Customer case studies were presented by eight customers, including Virgin Media, Nationwide, NYSE Euronext, Ross Stores and Guy Carpenter alongside four partner case studies presented by Business Objects, MicroStrategy, Cognos and Unica. These business tracks included information about customers with the following characteristics:

• loading billions of rows of data per day, in excess of 1 TB in total
• growing data volumes at 100%-to-200% annualized rates
• realizing 10s of millions of dollars in revenue returned to their businesses
• supporting up to 10,000 users accessing the NPS appliance
• slashing SLA data availability times by over two hours
• performing near-real time operational analytics on data loaded every five minutes into the data warehouse
• making real-time least-cost traffic routing decisions based on the freshest possible data
• delivering new enterprise-wide applications & reports at better than a two-per-month rate

One of the pleasant surprises, for me at least, was the level of interest in the technical track sessions, many of which were filled to capacity. Based on this and feedback we received from the conference, I'm sure we'll be looking at ways to provide more possibilities for attendees to attend more of the technical track sessions in 2008.

We finished the day Tuesday with the party/event of the conference as attendees were taken by motorcoach to Cyclorama in Boston's South End for a night of food, music and spirited participation in the video games. The games included virtual skateboarding, auto racing, skiing and several instances of Nintendo Wii games of golf, tennis, baseball, bowling and boxing. All told, at least five Wii consoles along with other sundry electronic "tools" were given away at random to lucky winners that night.

One of the most enjoyable parts of the Cyclorama event for me was watching the various interactions of people with the Wii electronic game "appliance". Because of the easy interactivity it enables, this device is disrupting the video gaming industry - and its captivating attraction was quite evident at our event. Gaming "pros" and neophytes were interacting with it, and providing all the body English one would expect on a tennis court, baseball field or bowling alley. Observing the panoply of those motions across 5-6 Wii stations from about 100 feet away was pure hilarity.

Following Cyclorama, it was back to the hotel (or on to other Boston evening venues to be discovered), in preparation for Wednesday's day-long activities. More on those in my next "Gateway to Insight" posting...