It's summer, so spring 2019 is booking up fast
What a season of technology events this is.
Well, to be clear, what a season of technology events awaits us through the ‘fall‘ period in 2018.
All the tech symposia and conference proceedings about to take place have a healthy dose of keynotes, breakout sessions, hackathons, Proof of Concept (PoC) labs and so on… the CWDN blog will be attending a handful of shows this coming season and will (obviously) gravitate towards the events with the greatest relevance to the software application development community.
All well and good for happy days ahead then?
Umm… yes and no.
There are a couple of trends to point out with regard to the way things are done.
Early birds
Firstly, there’s a handful of vendors out there who are prepared to lay down their spring (April/May) 2019 event details early.
These firms include Okta, ServiceNow, Progress, SAP (for Sapphire) and the OpenStack Denver show slated for April 29, 2019.
What the marketing engines behind a lot of these shows do is invite partners, customers, press & analysts and all other relevant attendees now… and obviously that makes everybody’s life easier in terms of planning.
Later-gaters
Then there are the late risers.
A list of who sits in this category would be pointless and unproductive; but suffice it to say that it’s August 21st today and there are a whole handful of August and September event invites for Europe and the USA coming in this week.
Most people would (arguably, one imagines) have made plans by now.
Clash-bashes
Then there are the firms whose ‘bash’ is scheduled in a Week of Death (WoD).
As the name suggests, a Week of Death is one where five or more technology vendors unwittingly schedule their event at the same time as another interesting firm.
This year’s WoD is w/c 22nd October when you can find all of the following events clashing with each other: DevOps Jenkins World, NetApp Insight, Oracle OpenWorld, Tableau Conference, Open Source Summit Scotland, SAP TechEd Europe and MediData Next 2018.
Of course it begs the question: should these firms talk to each other in order to look for clearer weeks to book events? Perhaps they do it deliberately to blast out techies’ options for attending other shows? Perhaps they just don’t really think about it anyway.
We could start to host an event calendar and highlight these things, but that wouldn’t actually solve the issue and we’d probably still end up with early birds, later gaters and clash bashes.
Oh well, let’s enjoy it all for what it is. Oh, the places you’ll go!