Sources suggest that the U.S. leg of IBM's Information On Demand Conference program will continue the focus on business analytics that the company's earlier European event centered on back in May. IBM used its previous EMEA gathering in Rome to justify its position on business analytics for both structured and unstructured data.

The conference will take place in Las Vegas on October 24 -28 2010. IBM says it will use this meeting of minds to address exactly how the company is working with clients to help them capture, analyze, collaborate and predict on information within and outside of their organization.

Heavily driven by IBM consultancy services, Big Blue's justification for its expertise in this area (or sales angle if you prefer) is that globalization and the general explosion of information results in a continuous cycle of inefficiency and operational complexity.

IBM calls for a fundamental shift to a 'smarter, fact-based enterprise' -- and suggests that business leaders are making crucial business decisions 'based almost entirely on intuition and personal experience' rather than intelligent information.

While this would seem to be somewhat overstating the point, the company's portfolio of business intelligence, advanced analytics, financial performance and strategy management applications are what is on show here. With many of these offerings coming from proven technologies including IBM Cognos, IBM SPSS and IBM ILOG as well as its own business analytics software, there are clearly proven practices to be had for companies that have identified the lack of a fact-based edge to their operations.