The IBM Information on Demand 2013 is in full swing at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, Nevada.  The event kicked off yesterday and will run through until the 7th of November. Watch our live coverage of the event, with exclusive interviews, right here on SiliconANGLE, or on SiliconANGLE.tv.

Watch IBM IoD live!  on SiliconANGLE.tv

IBM IoD is all about putting Big Data and analytics to work, democratizing data across an organization so everyone’s able to make better decisions and work more efficiently. The event is designed to help developers discover new skills, build their network, learn from professionals, and experience new technology.

This year’s theme: “Think Big. Deliver Big. WIN BIG.”

Follow online

If you aren’t able to attend the conference, check out the latest happening from IBM itself via Twitter – @ibm_iod, #ibmiod, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+, or here at SiliconANGLE.  theCube has a special coverage of the event, together with hosts SiliconANGLE CEO and Founder John Furrier, Wikibon Co-founder and Senior Analyst Dave Vellante.  You can also follow theCube guys on Twitter, @furrier, and @dvellante.

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What to expect

At this year’s event we’re looking to see how Big Data products are being brought to the market, and how they’re performing in real world use cases.  One advantage IBM has is an extensive history working with Big Data software, developing its solutions over several years, not just since Big Data became a buzzword.  The result is a broad portfolio of specific products for the most immediate industries, like healthcare, security, marketing and retail.  So at theCUBE, we’ll be asking IBM executives and clients of their experiences with IBM products, learning from first-hand accounts.

IBM’s also in the midst of re-focusing its messaging around its analytics portfolio, showcasing Analytics, Social Data, Mobile and the Cloud.  What’s important to note here is how these four pillars interact with each other, and how IBM can leverage their interconnectivity and overlap.  According to Wikibon Principle Analyst Jeff Kelly, Social Data is key to this interconnectivity, contributing a great deal to the way data is sourced, how it’s used for machine-learning, and how it can improve the interactions between complex machines and human end users.

Recent developments

 Here at SiliconANGLE, we have extensively covered IBM and its efforts in Big Data and analytics.  The latest:

• Dedicated to big data products, buys & partners

Last October, in partnership with IBM, SiliconANGLE held a  #dataeconomy CrowdChat to discuss how data value is contributing to organizations.  Experts gave their two cents regarding the topic with Wikibon CTO David Floyer, stating that data is more valuable when it is close to other related data.  Furrier also stated the importance of having a person or a group, separate from the CIO, to handle all the data.

You can see IBM’s focus on Big Data with its recent acquisition of the Now Factory and Daeka Image Systems Ltd., and its collaboration with Deutsche Telekom to provide the IBM MobileFirst platform in the cloud to European SMB customers.

• Dedicated to open source

This year, IBM is also making it big on the open source market with the introduction of the PowerLinux 7R4, an open system that sports a scaled-down version of Watson’s brain, announced an alliance with Pivotal to develop the Cloud Foundry platform and open source project.

In a recent interview with Inhi Cho Suh on theCUBE, the vice president of product management for IBM’s information management business, she explained that the main goal for the company is to facilitate analytics at the speed of exploration.  She also concurred with Stefan Groschupf’s, the co-founder and CEO of Datameer, statement that Hadoop will always remain as a batch system.

“Hadoop is really offline batch, and the design point is to leverage the distributed memory and all system capabilities of that kind of architecture. With stream computing it’s a completely different design of being able to sense and respond. When I think about Hadoop, [ I] think about the things you do in your head, you’re in a mode of deep reflection, you want to sit back [and] think about what happened during the day,” Suh said. “When you’re in sense and respond mode…you’re naturally responding based on instinct and experience all in under a second.”

So what will IBM have in store for us during the conference?  Stay tuned for more IBM IoD updates, and see Cho’s entire segment below.