The Tableau Conference: What's in a Name?

Recently, one of our longtime friends, Andy Kriebel asked why we've dropped "customer" from our conference name. The answer? We welcome everyone to come and talk about data. The outcome of that is to further inspire our customers.

Why does the name of the @Tableau conference no longer include "customer"? Is it not about the customer anymore? http://t.co/Mo9xc0o1Rx

— Andy Kriebel (@VizWizBI) April 30, 2014

You can be sure that the focus of the conference is about Tableau and its customers. We are delighted that people like Andy appreciate the fact that we focus on our customers and have reflected that in our conference name in the past.

What’s changing in the conference beyond the name and the hashtag (#data14)? Not much really. It’s still 100% about inspiring people to do better things with their data, using Tableau. We are going to increase the ways we can inspire you. We are adding more session tracks to inspire customers. There will be more thought leadership and TED-style talks. These will be about data, but not necessarily Tableau – for example, my “5 influential visualisations” wasn’t about Tableau, but it set off light-bulbs in our customers. Won't it be cool to have lots of content like that from leaders in the data world?

In fact, the change is to help inspire people like Andy. He's a valuable customer, a Zen Master and a great Tableau advocate. He's also been to many Tableau Conferences. What we want to do is ensure Andy and others like him keep coming back.

We need to inspire people like Andy with another level of content, new stuff, out-of-the-box stuff. To do that, we want our customers to listen to, to network with, and to learn from, other data visionaries. For those reasons, we've dropped "customer" from the name.

Let us know if you have any more questions or comments about the name change. We'd like to know what you think.

We look forward to seeing you in Seattle.

Go to the Conference site