The Tableau Customer Conference 2013 turned out to be a truly inspiring event. Hans Rosling captured the hearts and minds of the packed event room as did Andy Kriebel (Facebook), JP Rangaswami (Salesforce), Tableau’s own Christian Chabot and many customer speakers such as Cisco’s Rob Higgins / Paul Laza, Unilever and Medway Youth Trust’s Gary Seaman.

The event featured 11 stages for concurrent presentations and with so many informative and interesting speakers it was often a tough choice to make. Needless to say the wealth of knowledge at the event was incredible; it was great to see the innovative ways in which Tableau is being used as well as the achievements made by organisations and individuals to overcome common data issues. There were many teaching sessions as well as the ‘Tableau Doctor’ booth to help with learning / creative dashboarding and problem solving.

InterWorks were a gold sponsor of the event and had a great presence there especially when the InterWorks Tiger showed up and ‘assisted’ with Facebook’s presentation. Despite the intervention Andy Kriebel still had some solid praise for the work that InterWorks do “The best consultants in the business……..hands down”. Thanks Andy, we try.

InterWorks have been working closely with the charity ‘Medway Youth Trust’. Gary Seaman’s talk on predictive modelling and text analytics was a real hit at the show and generated a huge buzz. This type of modelling is an incredible way to gain insight into rich data from free-text fields and Gary has used it to help identify some of the UK’s most ‘at risk’ children.

Google Big Data had a great presence at the event and generated a lot of interest in their incredibly accessible and secure database platform. I think we can also see some exciting things coming from Datasift’s data acquisition tool in the near future.

InterWorks were presented with the Marketing Excellence Award for their Tableau work during the last year. This award was received by Dan Murray, author of the highly anticipated book “Tableau Your Data!: Fast and Easy Visual Analysis with Tableau Software“ which will be out really soon.

If you missed this 5 Star event do not despair because the next conference is in Washington DC and looks set to be the biggest ever.