I was lucky enough to accompany Dennis to Ascential World 2004 and help him man the booth so we could get the word out regarding the best place to go for Ascential answers! The show was held in Las Vegas this past Monday and Tuesday at the Mirage Hotel. Though we all got a lot of kidding from friends about going to Las Vegas “for work”, it really ended up with very little time for “fun” since breakfast started at 7:00 am and events were held until 11:00 pm. A few folks did stay up very late to spend some time sampling “Sin City” (no names please – what happens in Vegas, STAYS in Vegas) and they were easily noticeable by the bleary eyes and coffee-cups connected via IV-drips the next day.

Ascential World 2004 had over 700 attendees from over 25 countries. There were numerous presentations from Ascential personnel, as well as over two dozen end-users, consultants, or vendors explaining how they solved their problems using Ascential’s products. There were also quite a few sponsors (like us) in the exhibit hall demonstrating all kinds of hardware and software solutions that were related in some way to Ascential’s data integration solutions.

One of the best presentations was one that detailed what would be coming out in the next “big release” in 2005, codenamed “Hawk”. Hawk will enter beta in 1st quarter of 2005, and represents a complete overhaul of the Ascential product line from the ground up. Some of the key features they talked about were:

They even did a quick demonstration of the Sorcerer interface at a general assembly. To say that it was different would be an understatement. The Ascential engineers spent months with usability experts studying how both old and new users worked with their products. This allowed them to determine what changes developers need so they could become more effective. The tab-based interface looked tighter, more intuitive, and seemed to eliminate most of the roadblocks someone would typically encounter while designing or running projects.

Of all the presentations I saw, I think my favorite was one by Steven Gordon of IBM and Mike Beckerly of Ascential regarding GRID Computing. If you aren’t familiar with GRID Computing, it’s basically the art of tying all the computing resources at a company together into a loosely-coupled “mega-computer”. Tasks are then split up and farmed out in parallel to any resource that is showing available cycles. The end results are then collected back up and reassembled as the task proceeds (think “SETI project”). Jobs are completed orders of magnitude faster (minutes instead of hours) and hardware that was sitting idle is used more effectively. As you can well imagine it requires vast amounts of data flying around the network in a highly secure, controlled fashion, and IBM uses Ascential’s products (with some of their own) to do this at major customers around the world. It was fascinating stuff, and my only regret was they only had 45 minutes to get into it.

Overall it was time well spent. If I saw you there at the show, it was great to meet you. If you didn’t make it, I hope to see you there next year!