Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the IDC Business Intelligence and Analytics Forum at the Marriott Marquis hotel in New York's Times Square. Overall it was a terrific conference; somewhat different from search-oriented conferences in that there was a strong focus on how organizations use the tools and the value they create, in very concrete terms.

This past week I attended the Enterprise Search Summit (ESS) in New York City. It was, as usual, a terrific conference, filled with interesting people and ideas. One particular highlight was the SearchDev.org dinner, hosted by New Idea Engineering (and sponsored by Attivio). I particularly enjoyed catching up with Nick Patience at the 451 Group; you can read his write-up of ESS here .

I was also very pleased to present on the topic of "Unified Information Access: Combining Search and BI Capabilities for Better Business Decisions" as part of the "Search Tools at Work" breakout. I focused primarily on our Baseball Demo , our FacetFinder and forthcoming image search module. Time ran out before I could present a variety of interesting case studies (featuring our customers), including quite remarkable work we are doing to support search with complex permissions, in real time, without using a database... more on that in a future post.