InfoSol We're passionate about inspired business intelligence
Well, IBIS 2026 really was the best IBIS ever with 3 days of immersion in the best of everything BusinessObjects and the future of Business Intelligence.
The conference kicked off with the Monday keynote on BusinessObjects Enters the New Kingdom where I drew a parallel between Ancient Egypt’s Golden Age (the New Kingdom) and where BusinessObjects is in its current product lifecycle (it’s Golden Age). The elephant in the room, AI, also featured heavily in the keynote with both examples of failed AI projects and examples of how it can be used effectively and embedded in BusinessObjects for functional AI, chatbots, connecting to custom LLM’s, privacy-first AI and now automatic application generation.
Next up was the annual InfoSol Dashboard Awards with some truly awesome winners this year. Two of this year’s winners were using Web Intelligence and the third was custom dashboards for monitoring robotics analytics using AI-generated dashboards. There will be a separate blog on these so no spoiler alert.
The 45 breakout sessions were all compelling and it was difficult to choose between the 3 tracks. I stuck mainly to the Customer Case Study track because I love hearing about how people are using BusinessObjects and BI in the real world. I was not disappointed with sessions ranging from using the new Webi Data Tab mode to combine 28 different data sources to produce a Webi dashboard that showed up to the minute status of drug shipments to a solution where doctors using natural language could ask questions about mental health patients input (entered through phone app) and their historical and current status.
There was a lot of buzz around a new AI generation solution for InfoBurst Squirrel, code named “Tufty” which was on display in the Exhibit area. The approach here is one of “AI that builds with you, not for you”. This theme of using AI as an assistant for someone rather than a replacement for someone was prevalent throughout the conference.
The second day started with a great presentation and interview with Santi Becerra, the developer of Xcelsius, Roambi and a BI/AI visionary who explained how AI would change BI in the next few years and change the role of the typical BI developer to be more of domain expert and curator of semantics.
It was appropriate that Santi was there with his family to receive the special Award posthumously for the great Santiago Becerra who was inducted into the BusinessObjects Hall of Fame this year.
Tuesday night saw an amazing performance by the Native American “Yellowhouse Dancers” treating the attendees to a combination of traditional, fancy and hoop dancing.
The Wednesday keynote panel discussion featured 3 BusinessObjects customers talking about both their current and planned future usage of BusinessObjects. The message was clearly one of BusinessObjects is here to stay for the foreseeable future along with excitement to see AI as part of that journey.
The DashApp awards of the best operational dashboard solution resulted in a dead heat this year between two very different solutions, one being a What if calculator app and the other using privacy-first AI.
The InfoBurst Squirrel Hackathon also saw a couple of great solutions for Water Conservation created in just a few hours.
There were so many great takeaways at IBIS 2026 that I created a separate “Top 10 Takeaways of IBIS 2026” post which you can view on Plus.SpeakBO.com with a free account.
My final takeaway is Save the Date for IBIS 2027: June 14-16, 2027. See you there!
