My regular live-blogging posts from the FASTforward conference are cross-posted here as well as the FASTforward blog, but check out the FASTforward blog for a ton of other content: other bloggers at the show, and some great video interviews by Jerry Michalski with the conference speakers and some of us bloggers. It’s the next best [...]
Last breakout session of the day, and it was a tough decision: there was one on business intelligence built on search, but I opted for the enterprise mashups session with Arnt Schoning and Espen Sommerfelt of FAST, plus Stefan Sveen from Comperio, one of their partners that builds search solutions on top of the FAST [...]
I was delayed getting to the next session on using search as the next generation of enterprise portal by Kara Hansen of Disney, so missed a bit at the beginning. She described how they use FAST to crawl content across multiple enterprise sites to create a virtual view of their content, both enterprise wide and [...]
The breakout sessions have started, and I’m sitting in on the financial services track for a couple of sessions, since my primary customer base is in financial services. Adam Sussman at TABB Group is discussing how search technology will change the relationship dynamics of the institutional brokerage industry, where there is a much different relationship [...]
It’s the first session after lunch, and the first time that we’ve heard an actual FAST presentation, by Bjørn Olstad, their CTO, discussing next-generation innovation in search technology. They have segmented their audience into two main groups: Monetization, which is driving revenue by creating unique user experiences that match customers to relevant assets Enterprise, which [...]
The morning finished with Jared Spataro, a Microsoft product manager for SharePoint, responsible for enterprise search: namely, the group in which FAST will belong after the acquisition completes. He talked about why Microsoft is making this acquisition, how FAST will benefit, and what this means for customers. Microsoft started to look at enterprise search about [...]
Tom Davenport presented on competing on analytics — he published an article with this title in 2006 in HBR. He believes that the planets are aligned for analytics: Powerful IT, and a new model for IT use Data critical mass: ERP, POS and web data Skills sufficiency, at least for the individual pieces Business need: [...]
David Weinberger — author of Everything is Miscellaneous — spoke about the power of digital disorder, and how we need to unlearn what we think that we know about the best ways to organize information. He feels that we’re approaching the end of the age of information — by which he means a focus on [...]
Clare Hart, EVP of Dow Jones‘ Enterprise Media Group spoke about rising expectations and new patterns for interacting with information. She started with the four macro trends that are impacting business and consumers today: Globalization Distributed workforce Follow the sun business cycle Information overload Information is being exchanged around the world instantaneously, and this constantly [...]
The wifi continues to be flaky — good connection strength but no actual connectivity — but there’s power at the tables which almost makes up for it. Almost. We started the day with John Markus Lervik (plus a light show, an enormous inflated ball, a small bit of theater and a live band) discussing the [...]
Usually when I attend a vendor/product user conference, I know quite a lot about the product; this time, however, I’m flying a bit blind. I’m at FASTforward, which is ostensibly the user conference for FAST Search & Transfer, but is actually a lot more than that: billed as “the industry’s largest business & technology conference [...]
I’ll be attending three conferences in the next three weeks (after a hiatus of over two months, it’s going to be strange to get back on a plane), and live-blogging from each conference, wifi permitting. Next week is the Gartner BPM summit in Las Vegas: one of the key BPM conferences of the year (at [...]
