TROY ? WIT President Quaid Saifee said he hoped 70 people who show up for his Business Intelligence and Big Data Summit on March 14. Instead 178 people showed up from business and technology leaders, Fortune 500 companies as well as small to mid-sized Michigan and Ohio companies.

?It show there?s a pent up demand from a lot of people who don?t want to spend thousands of dollars for a big BI conference out of state,? Saifee said. ?The closest BI events you can attend are in Chicago. By bringing a small show to Southfield, people here can talk from each other and learn from each other. We have hit on something and will continue as long as community supports it.?

Already WIT plans to continue this event next year. The date is set, March 13, 2014, but the location remains to be determined. Saifee said he anticipates 300 or more attendees for the second WIT Business Intelligence conference.

The Summit began with a keynote from Donald Farmer, a well-known champion of Agile BI and the VP of Product Management at QlikTech, discussing ?BI for the Right Side of the Brain.? From there, attendees were offered 10 presentations across two tracks – business case studies and technology vendor presentations.

Discussing key successes in BI were Michigan-based organizations Haworth, Kelly Services, Oakland University and Quicken Loans, as well as the humorous West Coast blog Cheezburger. Tech vendors included Attivio, iDashboards, Microsoft, QlikTech and SAS.

The day came to a close with a final keynote from thought-leader Wayne Eckerson, author of ?Secrets of Analytical Leaders,? speaking about, ?The Big Data Revolution: Integrating Big Data in BI Ecosystems.?

Surveys completed by attendees gave the conference mostly ?As and Bs,? Saifee said. The majority of attendees said they came to hear about big data, a term coined about 18 months ago that defines the avalanche of data covering business professionals from all the digital sources. Business Intelligence tools provide a way to analyze this data and make sense out of it, Saifee said.

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