The IETF posted that travel bans may impact its decisions on where to hold conferences. This has got me thinking.
A substantial number of people travel internationally to conferences that are hosted in the USA, in part because these conferences have the best content
Large vendor conferences that I have attend HPE Discover, Cisco Live, VMworld have been well attended by numbers of overseas attendees. I don’t have exact numbers, can’t find any ?
Big deals are often done at these conferences where executives from customer and vendor will fly in to finalise a deal.
Confereneces are critical to sales cycles of big US companies who will 1) reward customers with free trips 2) accompany customers to see what interests them 3) forge/strengthen relationships with customers who may be moving away from them.
From a personal perspective, I’m in the final stages of content planning for the Packet Pushers two day workshop at the Interop ITX conference on May 15-16. Last year, we had a large contingent of overseas folks attend Interop in large part to hear us and for some this was their first trip to the USA.
Many conferences3 are already struggling to maintain attendees, vendors and revenue. The current political events (about which I make no comment) may have impact in the key aspect of learning, dissemination and community. Could these impact the adoption of technology or can we replace face-to-face interaction with Interaction ?
Apposite View: Would reducing the reliance on personal interaction improve the vendor/product/customer/solution/cost/profit timeline ? A key aspect of public cloud is the removal of sales/buying costs – there are no sales people, zero price haggling or product evaluation. Would Enterprise IT be better off taking self-ownership and full responsibility for the technology it operates ? Thats one thing that public cloud/DevOps shows, self-ownership gets better results.
Got any thoughts ? Leave a comment below (Note: no politics, I’ll just delete it).
Link: Workshops and Summits | Interop ITX – http://www.interop.com/workshops-and-summits. Use the code PacketPushers to get 20% off.
The IETF does not make comments on political matters. But we do comment on topics that affect the IETF and the Internet. Specifically, the recent action by the United States government to bar entry by individuals from specific nations raises concerns for us—not only because upcoming IETF meetings are currently scheduled to take place in the U.S., but also because the action raises uncertainty about the ability of U.S.-based IETF participants to travel to and return from IETF meetings held outside the United States.
Link: Barriers to entry | IETF Blog – https://www.ietf.org/blog/2017/01/barriers-to-entry/
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