Last week I attended the Symantec WorldWide Industry Analyst Conference, co-located at the annual Symantec Vision conference in Las Vegas. Analyst conferences are always good opportunities to meet executives and, less often, to receive insights from customers.

A staple of analyst conferences, and of analyst slide decks, is something I call the We’re-So-Big Slide. WSB typically makes a forceful, quantitative statement about the core business asset the company possesses. For example:

• The number of sensors deployed in the field
• Assets under management
• Nodes monitored by a managed service

Symantec’s We’re-So-Big Slide is their Global Intelligence Network slide that shows how many countries they operate threat response centers in, and the number of sensors deployed in the field. These sensors serve as honeypots that capture malicious code and network traffic, and provide visibility to their anti-malware labs. They are very proud of their threat network, and rarely miss an opportunity to tell customers and analysts how many sensors they have.

Today’s first sighting of the The WSB Slide was provided by Symantec Chief Strategy Officer Greg Hughes. Yankee Group blog readers will be pleased to know that Symantec has 40,000 sensors deployed worldwide. For sure, all those sensors are helping their labs get lots of visibility into new threats.

The We’re-So-Big Slide is handy shorthand for “We’ve got an asset that is key to our success, and we are flogging it like a jockey on a racehorse. Just how much are we flogging it? So glad you asked. Here’s a slide that tells you exactly how much.”

I always look for The WSB Slide because it’s like an old friend: familiar, comforting and you don’t have to waste time getting re-acquainted. The WSB Slide also tells you something, if only subliminally, about what the company feels is important. There is a super-important downside to keep in mind with WSB, though, which I’ll discuss in a future blog post.