Why We L-O-V-E Tradeshows

March 26th, 2008 by Julia Lim

No, that’s not me being sarcastic. We really do love them. I guess it doesn’t hurt to have met and closed a fairly large customer within a few months of one of our shows. Marketers, eat your heart out – we’ve got a great ROI story that can be tied directly to a specific show and that show only. But the real reason we love trade shows is because they literally drive all those nice stakeholders we talk about in the abstract (our target audience) right into our…conversations.

(Photo Credit: Mindjet)

Where else but at one of these shows are you going to have person after person coming by whom you really really want to talk to? What’s important to them? What problems are they trying to solve? What lights up their eyes – and what makes them glaze over – when you talk about your product?

At FOSE and INTEROP New York last year, we took this another step and conducted surveys on the importance of different IT issues and trends. Are your eyes glazing over?

Here’s why you should care:

1) The Voice of the People – it takes things like surveys (and blogs!) to make sure that the average Joe gets his voice heard. Would you rather hear from a vendor or a peer about what the next big IT problem/solution is?

2) Someone Just Like You – it could be you. We survey system administrators, network engineers and IT managers – all the IT operations management people we can bribe with a t-shirt to spend a couple of minutes with us. The interesting thing: once they get started, a lot of them just want to talk. My favorite story from Interop last year was the guy who asked if he could write in “ZERO” when asked about the importance of IPv6 to his IT department – on a scale of 1 to 5. Of course, we let him.

3) Cutting Through the Hype – One very interesting trend that popped up as part of the survey itself was people saying that something was important but having no solution or immediate plans for implementing a solution. It happened over and over again for topics like FISMA, ITIL and IT Asset Management among others.

We have two theories about this. The first is that, like so many of us, IT workers have too much on their plates. Technology waits for no one. So is having a complete IT asset inventory important? Of course. Do people have a solution in place for it? Last year, they were still trying to play catch up.

Here’s the second theory: sometimes you have to cut through the hype on the latest IT trend to find out what you really need to do with it. Out of all the people we surveyed at FOSE, 93% said Virtualization Management was important. Only 20% had tools in place for it. You do the math.

We’re going to be conducting another survey at FOSE this year. After the show, we’ll compare the year-over-year results and share that with you all. And if you’re going to be at FOSE, please stop by and have your voice heard and get a t-shirt to boot.

ScienceLogic will be at booth 2731, April 1-3.

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