Orion aims to impress at its annual Advisor Forum

As afternoon thunderstorms rolled off the Rocky Mountains, the Gemini + Orion Advisor Forum 2011 officially kicked off in Denver, Colo.

According to Kyle Hiatt, VP of Business Development for Orion Advisor Services, I’m attending the event with roughly 300 other clients, prospects, and interested parties of Gemini Fund Services and Orion. The majority of my time over the next few days will be spent on the portion of sessions conducted by Orion.

Tech Lab

Orion’s session today featured a Tech Lab, open to any and all who wanted to learn more about the platform, see new features demonstrated, and interact with many of the engineering and support staff on site. What impressed me about the Tech Lab was its light footprint.

The Orion Advisor Services Tech Lab

There were five lab stations in all, running off of either 11″ MacBook Air ultra-portable laptops or 13″ MacBook Pros, each connected to 27″ Apple Cinema Display monitors. The occasional iPad made an appearance as well to demo Orion’s mobile app.

All systems were running Orion’s Advisor Desktop portfolio management system through the Citrix Receiver application. The Orion Web Access components were demonstrated on Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers. Three of the five Macs were running Lion, the latest version of the Mac operating system.

The conference facility did provide a hard-wired Internet connection for the Tech Lab, though a local Wi-Fi network was created to connect the MacBook Air laptops to the Internet.

Nevertheless, it was quite impressive to see how Orion’s platform (in use by firms that manage billions of dollars) could run off a laptop computer that fits inside an inter-office envelope. It really demonstrates the power and flexibility of hosted services and the cloud computing model.

As with most conferences today, attendees are encouraged to share their thoughts via social media. Forum tweets are tagged with #GOAF11 and the official Twitter account for the event is @AdvisorForum.

I look forward to attending sessions over the next two days covering many of the new features and additions to the Orion platform and will update FPPad as time permits.