As I wander the endless corridors of this behemoth of a hotel (2000 rooms!) I find myself using google maps just to get from my room to the lobby every wrong turn takes me on a voyage of discovery, huddled groups of knowledge workers discuss how, why and when they use data.

Change hangs heavy in the air in Washington DC just ask Barack Obama, and to quote common (he is a poet and rapper if you don’t know) “change is inevitable, you can’t stop it, change is happening in everyone’s life, change is like a furious hurricane that you can’t stop.” the amount of discussions around data integration, cloud computing, solid state technologies, geospatical and in-database analytics indicates that change is massively on the agenda here at Teradata , one guy told me that they have released more product in the last 13 months than they did in 30 years!

An important factor is forcing this change and it isn’t the technology companies, its the consumers, their demands of being “always on” are dictating that companies must get smarter with data.

I finish with a quote from Stephen Brobst the CTO of Teradata “IT must relinquish control of data, instead It must power the knowledge workers”