It’s interesting to see the evolving trends in the annual customer events that the heavyweight IT vendors throw. I remember Microsoft’s Convergence last year featuring some bizarre ethnic drumming combo in an effort to symbolise the coming together of enterprise applications, apparently. And the year before, at a Citrix event in Vegas (baby), CEO Mark Templeton bounded onto the stage in a pair of stonewashed denims, white t-shirt and possibly a baseball cap – although the mind plays tricks – to the strains of “Let’s get this party started” provided by a Citrix house band. Yeah, application acceleration…rock and roll y’all.

Obviously in a quest to go one better, or perhaps out of sheer boredom, Lawson Software’s numero one guy, Harry Debes, presented his opening keynote at this year's Cue event on Monday in a David Letterman-style mock studio, complete with leather sofa, house band (and accompanying witty repartee) and special guests. It was actually a fairly good rendering of the old Tonight Show in reality; terrible jokes, worse suits and a bunch of guests you’ve never heard of. And then a couple of penguins were thrust on stage alongside (probably) a Lawson employee inside a large furry whale suit. This sort of thing does nothing for the feeling of disorientation and uncertainty that comes after a 15 hour flight.