This was a conference for messaging vendors and IT staff involved in messaging. Vendors had various sponsorship opportunities, and could have a table-based booth.
General Observations
- Small, intimate conference. We enjoyed it and found it worthwhile
- Good place to network with people in the industry, exchange ideas
- Felt like a comfortable, better format than prior years--everyone's expectations were set appropriately
- IT messaging professionals have limited travel budgets--hence they came in limited numbers. Those that came were from large organizations.
Participants
- The organizers said there were a total of 400 attendees. This translates to 400 people who stopped by at some point
- The full-conference attendance was about 250 people participating
- About 125 people paid about $1,000 in order to register as ordinary paying participants
- There were about 90 buyers here; 50 of them being messaging IT staff, 40 of them from service providers of some sort
- Many of the service providers were email direct marketing firms. Interesting, because the event was supposed to be focused on IT
- The rest of the attendees were vendor staff, with a few waifs and strays from the analyst world, press, venture capitalists, and other factions
Sessions
- There were a variety of sessions. As usual, you took your chance on the quality
- There were often quite large time gaps between the sessions, which was useful for checking email, talking to people, and so on
- Keynotes had between 80 and 225 attendees
- Audiences weren't large--generally 15 to 35 people, of which 5 to ten might be colleagues of the speakers
Booths & Sponsorships
- Varying levels of sponsorship and visibility available
- There were no booths. Vendors could have tables instead
- Tables were maintained by: Anti-Phishing Working Group, AppRiver, Cemaphore, CipherTrust, Deerfield, Email Service Provider Coalition, Ferris Research, Habeas, IronPort, MailFrontier, NameProtect, OmniTI, Teneros, TRUSTe, VeriTest. The standard table cost was $3,000.
- Vendors who took a booth/table to sell product, and who sent several staff, were likely to be disappointed. There were too few end users at the event to justify the time and cost investment
- Vendors who had a broader mix of goals, eg selling plus briefing press and analysts plus meeting with business partners plus general networking plus making calls in Silicon Valley, had a good chance of finding the event worthwhile.
David Ferris and Richi Jennings