The first morning at IBM IOD 2012 opened with a bang! The auditorium was filled to the rafters. Very colorful visuals encouraged us to Think Big – Gain Big Insights – Embrace Big possibilities – Seize Big Opportunities.

Jason Silva hosted the morning’s event and had more energy than everyone else in the auditorium combined. Coffee would have helped, but the lines at Starbucks snaked through Mandalay. My Tweet observed that if they used IMS, there would be no lines.

Jason talked about how technology had already helped to identify the patterns that connect disparate things (subway tunnels and blood vessels), and then submitted for consideration the notion that Technology would soon prove the connectedness of all things. Technology as a spiritual path – who knew?

Certainly our gadgets connect us – 6 billion devices. These devices give us a voice, but the digital trail they leave, a “techno tsunami” of data, creates big opportunities for data analytics. And now we have the tools to leverage those opportunities and gain big insights that will change our world.

This blog post neatly summarizes most of the topics and personalities that brought us today’s Opening Session.

Later, in the world of IMS, Director Dinesh Nirmal welcomed the IMS Family at his Keynote session in the morning and provided a roadmap of the sessions and speakers they would find this week. He also shared his personal goal of driving IMS to 100K transactions per second. That was a nice point of connection with Robert LeBlanc’s earlier comment that transaction systems like IMS provided the genesis for today’s analytics systems. IMS Chief Architect Betty Patterson gave the “drill-down” presentation to clients about the recent announcement of IMS 13 Quality Partnership Program, and consultant and IBM Champion Dan Galvin, a self-proclaimed “IMS non-expert,” said how that worked to his advantage to help a major U.S. Insurance company create new IMS data access solutions (IMS-3596).

If you’d like to hear even more interesting connections between IMS, SQL, Java, and more, be sure to stop by session IMS-4030, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know about IMS and Java and SQL–yes, SQL” Wednesday at 6:15 in Islander I, where our senior technical team await your questions!