After a few days at TDWI, I have to ask myself, what recession? The conference which normally gets between 500 and 900 attendees had over 1000 people. This breaks the previous record for Vegas 06 when yours truly keynoted.
There was no doom and gloom among the general attendees on the economic or career outlook. Whether this is optimism or reality, the overall theme was that the BI market is on the rise and the outlook for new projects and careers is sunny.
I was lucky enough to kick off the Tuesday Executive Summit with about 200 senior IT and Business folks and in talking with them afterward, I got the same impression that companies continue to invest in BI/EPM and MDM as they are seen as strategic value not just technology projects. Many of their focus areas were on converging lines of business into one dashboard and building the MDM architecture to support it.
The expo floor was lively as ever with many of the same vendors and your usual string of upstarts. Seem like the appliance upstarts on the expo floor of the last couple of years have been replaced by the columnar database upstarts. TDWI is usually a good gauge of vendor content as the vendors can not compete in the ‘my booth is bigger than your booth’ that you find at other more pay-for-play conferences.
On Monday night, I taught an abbreviated version of my EPM/MDM Bootcamp Class. We had pretty strong attendance, taking into account the competition with the blackjack tables and slots in Vegas.
I guess my overall impression is that BI is alive and kicking if this conference is any indication.
