Ah Catalyst.   Catalyst is a force of nature.   All the right people are in the room – vendors, analysts, customers, and implementers.  It makes for some pretty intense, valuable conversations.

To me, this year was a year of revival – There were unmistakable signs of life after stack consolidation.  Walking through the hospitality suites, I saw new brands, new approaches, and new blood interspersed amongst the heavy hitters with long standing investment.

Burton changed their format a bit, and for the most part I liked the changes.  Things seemed less frenetic, and somehow the length of the breaks seemed better suited to quality conversation.  Some of the visual changes made to slide formats need tweaking, I think — My preference would be for the images to have been more tightly matched to slide text, so that I could use the image to mentally seek to a given topic, but still see the bullet points in addition.

Of all the interesting things that I experienced at Catalyst, there were two findings that really stood out for me.  I will write about each of these separately, just to keep you all on your toes :)    The first involves a lot of questions, while the second was an answer I’d never thought to quest for in detail.

With that, I’ll wish you all a Happy Canada Day and sign off!