What happens in Vegas…

I guess I should finish the title as “stays in Vegas”, but recently I came back from Microstrategy World 2011 where the key themes were dashboards and mobility for BI. The key note sessions went as far as to imply that laptops were a thing of the past and that smart phones and tablets will become the standard for accessing the internet and performing all of our transactions. The CEO of Microstrategy commented he ran the entire company from an iPhone/iPad application enabling him to keep control of the company from any location. In the back of mind, I was thinking that these themes were not new to me, two years ago working for a large CPG manufacturer we discussed the next generation on BI applications on an Iphone, the idea was truly ahead as of time, as nobody saw the device as a business tool but rather as nice “expensive toy. Going further back 10 years, when I was working for a top 10 retailer in San Antonio, we discussed how to enable the field managers by sending information to their mobile devices (back then we were experimenting with SMS and found different incompatibilities across carriers). I was thinking throughout the conference that I was not witnessing a BI vendor trying to change the market but I was seeing a BI vendor truly understanding how the market was shaping and capitalizing on a wave that is yet to reach its full potential. Granted the technology has evolved to the point that you can consume content on a Smartphone or tablet better than you can in paper, the kindle started the trend with text and the iPad popularized electronic/color versions of magazines and newspapers with Android and Apple paving the way for the next generation of consumer & business devices. We are living in exciting and connected times where the key differentiator will not be if you are receiving all the information you can, but rather only receiving the information you need when you need it in the format that is most easily consumable. So going back to the title of this post, let me finish it as follows “What happens in Vegas, came from outside of Vegas and will definitively extend beyond Vegas”