On day 4 I attended an interesting session  “Enabling the Bank of America Analytical Ecosystem“ by Bob Nicholson, Senior Vice President Technology at Bank of America. Bob talked about the very complex analytical ecosystem at Bank of America with around 6000 databases, 3300 users and greater than 2 petabytes of data. In order to have a strategic approach to disaster recovery a Resilency Hub was created (a backup and archive of production). using Teradata Data Mover. Bank of America had 43 TB data in 2002 and today the ecosystem  has 626 TB of data.  Bob also explained how the data from hub is fed to other systems. After the session I asked Bob whether Bank of America thinks Cloud Storage will play a role in their ecosystem. Bob mentioned that BofA is already having high utilization so he does not forsee cloud storage and was also concerned about security.

The second day of the 2011 Teradata Partners Conference started with Teradata business leaders talking about how the company is growing and investing . Mike Koehler, Teradata's CEO, described the new line of products, in particular ClaraView, Aprimo and Asterdata. Mike showed some quick statistics on the explosion in digital data from mobile, social, and sensor. The trends which  really drove his point were the increase in the Teradata’s Peta Byte Club and the 2011 IDC Digital Universe Study (sponsored by EMC) showing that in 2011 1.8 ZettaBytes (1.8 Trillion GigaBytes) of information will be created and replicated.

This was closely followed by Steven Levitt's session. The author of popular books "Freakonomics" and "Superfreakonomics," described his moments of truth in learning calculus and other interesting facts .