On Day One of IBM’s Information on Demand event in Las Vegas last week, theCUBE co-hosts  John Furrier and Dave Vellante kicked off live coverage with some pre-game analysis, stating the importance of the event, which focused on the “Big Data revolution combined with social business.”

Obviously, the big theme was transforming business. “Social business is real,” said Furrier, noting IBM’s emerging people-centric model and the fact that “conversation is the new webpage.”

The newest tool the crowd consumer has is the hashtag, and that is quickly becoming the fundamental component of the web, much like the URL. “The hashtag signifies interest, and it’s a gesture of both sentiment and discovery,” noted Furrier. “It is a way to tune in to the conversation and also the content, representing a new direct business model.”

IBM’s Information on Demand event this year was all about putting Big Data and analytics to work, so that people could make better decisions and work more efficiently.

Content comes from business practitioners, not IT

During this mid-day segment, Vellante highlighted that “the content here comes from business practitioners, not IT practitioners.” The first day of the event was dedicated to Analytics and Data Science, while the second was all about Social Business. As Wikibon Principle Analyst Jeff Kelly put it, “Big Data analytics is inherently a collaborative discipline,” so the idea to bring those two areas together, merging them along with cloud and mobile made a lot of sense.

“Last year IBMIoD was more like a coming out party, this year is all about Business Value,” said Kelly. Furrier noted that at this event everyone was talking about “business outcomes.” The term “knowledge worker” certainly caught Furrier’s attention at the Conference. He said that in current times it’s all about engaging workforces, harnessing the social data and connecting systems.

“This is where I think the Big Data will shine: putting the mobile device in the hands of a worker can make them the knowledge workers,” Furrier said. This concept of knowledge worker will ultimately be the Big Data a-ha moment: “You always say the killer app of Big Data is analytics, but to me it’s very clear that the business impact is going to be the value change in the instrumentation.”

Legitimizing the Social Business paradigm

Day Two of IBM Information on Demand Conference was focused on Social Business Analytics.

“What really makes the data work is the the business users,” said Furrier. “The paradigm of Social Business has become legitimate; the social business market is certainly changing radically, and the society is also changing,” he added. “Analytics is the killer app of Big Data, just like the email was the killer app of the internet.”

Vellante also wanted to congratulate IBM on redesigning IoD. “In previous years that was a collection of different business units, but now IBM is getting into the ‘viz biz.’ Project Neo gets IBM into the heart of the visualization business, a territory that’s been dominated by the likes of Tableau and ClickTech, so I’m very curious to see what the feedback is from customers on Neo,” admitted Vellante.

IBM pushing a new vision

IBMIoD was certainly among the largest Big Data conference on the planet, solely dedicated to Big Data and Analytics. “These are very exciting times if you are a tech athlete,” said Furrier. The wearable computer is becoming a reality, there’s a lot of innovation around cognitive computing, in-memory, real-time, SaaS, data monetization and virtualization.

“IBM is pushing their vision and their thought leadership around big data and analytics and streams, around embedding the business analytics into processes; the customers are a couple of years behind that, but they were all intrigued by the vision that IBM is laying out. They are getting good value from what they’re doing right now; it may not be big Data analytics in the sense that it’s not Hadoop or streaming real-time data, but it’s doing some interesting things with large volume of data and they are actually moving the needle,” explained Kelly.

“IBM needs to do a better job telling the story and spend less time talking about the point products,” Kelly continued, reiterating what Gartner Analyst, Merv Adrian, said in his interview. “IBM has come a long way in the last two years on this front.”

“I’m really excited by the social business story; I think it’s not really coherent yet from IBM standpoint, but I think that it’s an amazing conversation that everyone wants to have. And I do believe that they are on the right track,” added Furrier.

During the event theCUBE co-hosts tried out its CrowdChat online event, an experiment that proved to be successful. There were over a million timeline impressions in just a couple of hours.

“I felt that going to Twitter directly was awkward, but that’s an example of crowd activity innovation that we rolled out, and that’s in line with the the theme of the show which is social business so the communication that the people want to have at these events is proof that IBM social business strategy is right on the money because that is the future: the crowd consumer, the qualified crowd. That’s the new sales model and the new marketing model,” said Furrier. Vellante agreed: “Running a CrowdChat allows us to capture the essence of theCUBE interviews.”