The global high-tech events industry experienced the virtual equivalent of a train smash over the past month as most large-scale physical events postponed during the March-May global lockdown were shoehorned into the middle of June.
The biggest casualty was SAP, which left 150,000 attendees of its Sapphire Now virtual conference hanging when its conference website crashed as the 4-day event began. Viewers were eventually redirected to Twitter, but only around 2,400 “got the memo” to watch CEO Christian Klein give his pre-debut keynote at the annual event. He later apologised, blaming a third party provider of the conference facility.
The sheer scale of online attendance at such events has proved to be a challenge to even the largest technology companies. SAP last year hosted 30,000 people at Sapphire in Orlando, itself up from 21,000 the year before. The five-fold increase this year was unprecedented.
Many events were bedevilled by the poor home connections of presenters themselves, resulting in both video and audio breaking up.
The major advantage of such virtual events is that all proceedings can be viewed later, on-demand. Particularly as many of these were beamed from the San Francisco area, home to Silicon Valley, time differences made live viewing unfeasible in many parts of the world. SAP made amends by announcing “The Conversation Continues”, with on-demand availability of all sessions.
Mid-June also saw the virtual staging of the Cisco Live conference from San Francisco, and the SAS Global Forumfrom the data analytics company SAS Institute’s HQ in North Carolina. VeeamOn 2020, originally scheduled for Las Vegas in May by the storage management specialist, moved to the Web in June, and saw its registrations leap from an expected few thousand to 23,000.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which last year attracted 10,000 paying delegates to HPE Discover in Las Vegas, did not give numbers for attendees at its online HPE Discover Virtual Experience this week, but it was expected that many multiples of the previous number would attend a total of 150 separate sessions. The event kicked off last Tuesday with a keynote by CEO Antonio Neri, who had revealed on Twitter a weekearlier that he had tested positive for the coronavirus but was recovering.
Several regional events aimed at the Europe, Middle East and Africa market, including the AWS Summit Online and Salesforce Live: EMEA, joined the crush. Both highlighted the contrasting experience of speakers with professional studio set-ups – such as the copybook appearance of Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels – and those speaking from basic home offices with average connectivity.
Apple gave one of the few flawless performances among the big names, when its 5-day Worldwide Developer Conference opened last Monday. While it was pre-recorded, that strategy had not served other companies as well.
Read more on the next page about events from Acer, Mimecast, among others.
Just an hour before it kicked off, Mimecast began its two-day Virtual Cyber Resilience Summit, and sent a lesson to the industry giants on how to stage an event flawlessly – coincidentally with a South African at the helm.
Tuesday afternoon also saw the virtual staging of Acer’s annual Global Press Conference, usually held in New York but this year beamed from the company’s headquarters in Taipei. While it ran smoothly, as one of the few hardware-focused events it highlighted the difficulty of providing the media with a hands-on experience in a virtual launch.
A comparatively small email management company, with a market capitalisation of less than $3-billion, Nasdaq-listed Mimecast was founded by Peter Bauer and Neil Murray when they moved from Cape Town to the United Kingdom in 2003. Bauer remains CEO of the organisation.
Aside from seamless blending of live and recorded content, the Mimecast event featured Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in a keynote, and an entertaining set of human characters called Human Error and Sound Judgement providing both light relief and serious lessons throughout the event. The piece de resistance, however, was a slick series of animated shorts showing Bauer visiting his “socially distanced” team on Mars.
The SAS Institute also gave an exemplary account of itself at its Global Forum, according to industry journal Channel Daily News. “Whoever put the virtual environment together had obviously learned from some of the less than wonderful efforts that have been foisted on us over the last few months,”it reported.
SAS followed in the footsteps of Kaspersky Lab, which coincidentally hosted an event called SAS@Home, but standing for Security Analyst Summit, at the end of April. Its execution, too, had been exemplary, despite relying on live presentations from speakers scattered across the globe.
Examples of less impeccable efforts included last month’s Microsoft Build, which required delegates to jump through hoops in order to register and attend on Microsoft’s own Teams platform, via a dedicated event account rather than their own Teams log-ins. Earlier in the month, Microsoft had also disappointed attendees to its May Inside Xbox games unveiling. It had promised “gameplay, trailers and sneak peeks”, but only the gameplay was delivered.
Aaron Greenberg, a general manager of Xbox marketing, was gracious in his response to the criticism. He said on Twitter: “Had we not said anything & just shown May Inside Xbox show like we did last month, I suspect reactions might have been different. Clearly we set some wrong expectations & that’s on us. We appreciate all the feedback & can assure you we will take it all in & learn as a team.”
That probably sums up the attitude of most technology giants who have learned just how different the virtual world is from physical conference halls and rooms.