The last session of the day was a short one with the two platinum sponsors of the conference, Michael Melenovsky of Satyam Consulting and Hub Vandervoort of Progress Software, with a quick plug for their products and services. I realize that these guys pay a lot to be here, so I’m not going to fault them for taking advantage of this opportunity.
Something that I discovered partway through the day: the wifi in the conference area is sponsored by Capability Measurement, one of the conference’s gold sponsors. Kudos to Lombardi for coming up with the idea of hitting up one of their sponsors for this essential service. I know that hotels and conference centers charge outrageous rates for wifi, given the tiny actual cost to them to run a wifi network, and having it as a sponsored part of the conference just like the breaks and receptions is a great idea.
All in all, I’m finding the conference well-organized and useful for customers. I think that they underestimated the interest in one of the sessions, which was held in the small of the breakout rooms to an over-capacity crowd, but otherwise the logistics worked well. More importantly, there’s lots of time left in each session for audience Q&A, and the audience is participating in full. This is a small conference — about 200 customer attendees — and that size is great for encouraging people to ask questions. There’s also lots of time between sessions to allow for informal discussions without eating into the session time. The small number of attendees and the relatively narrow focus of the audience does mean that there are only two concurrent sessions so not a lot of choice, although the schedule shows a couple of tomorrow’s sessions with three concurrent sessions.