Next week is Informatica World 2014 in Las Vegas. There are several good reasons to pay attention at what is happening there starting next Monday. First, if you are an Informatica customer, you can find out what’s new and trade tips with other custoemrs. That’s obvious. Second, if you want to hear a great talk by yours truly (and who wouldn’t want that) then this is your opportunity. So that’s two good reasons and I’ve just gotten started.

Ultimately Informatica World is about data. Test data, data integration, mobile data, data security, big data, data, data, and more data. Underneath all of our applications is data and dealing with it has become very complicated. As part of our mission at Neuralytix to make the complex simpler, I’ll be looking for the following:

1. How can companies handle huge amounts of small data. This is a key issue for social media data and the Internet of Things (if you believe in such a thing).
2. Ways to rationalize data. It’s not enough to collect large amounts of data. It needs to be organized into a model than can be analyzed efficiently and effectively. This is devilishly difficult and cries out for automation.
3. Tools that make data accessible to domain experts and, quite frankly, average knowledge workers. As long as data requires specialists such as data scientists to manipulate and analyze it, the whole idea of big data will refuse to scale. We need for data to stop being like a bug stuck in amber – forever encased and inert.
4. Securing mobile data. Lack of security of sensitive data on mobile devices is one of the things that keep IT up at night along with corporate compliance officers. It’s time to go beyond securing the connection or even the device and start securing information at a data element level based on location data.
5. Tools that help developers to work with data more quickly so as to keep up with Agile development methods. Actually, I won’t need to go looking for this since I’m going to be talking about it but it would be great to hear others talk about it.

More than anything else, I look forward to connecting with IT practitioners and hear their stories on data management. That’s why I like conference such as this; they provide the opportunity to connect with the people in the trenches. So, if you are going to be there, find me (come to my talk, maybe) and connect. I’ll be live tweeting and there will be a blog or two. And the weather should be nice. That’s important too.