Here’s an excerpt from an email from PASS I received on November 4 and also available at this link (bolding added by me):
The PASS BA Conference answers the call to meet the unique needs of business and data analysts, who are asked to do more with data every day. They are non-technical data professionals who work in finance, operations, marketing, sales, and customer service. Working with IT pros who architect, build, and facilitate data and analytics systems, business and data analysts can extract data from these systems to gain insights and drive the decision-making process.
That has me me thinking about what makes PASS special and successful? I’ve always thought it was a wide enough focus to hit critical mass, narrow enough to not try to be all things to all people. I’ve always thought PASS was technical data professionals who were more than happy to welcome a non-technical professional to attend and even willing to have non-technical presentations – soft skills in particular.
No conclusions today, just thinking. More tomorrow.
SQLAndy 
Yep, that’s the problem. When you want to expand, you can easily sell an existing product to a new audience, and you can easily sell a new product to an existing audience, but you wanna avoid selling a new product to a new audience. That’s where you lose your shirt.
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Unless you have really deep pockets. Can I tempt you with a comparison to the MS Surface?
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Ha! Well, in fairness, at least PASS was smart enough to budget a loss for 2016 in advance, heh.
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