OK, I didn’t exactly sneak in – Brian invited me. And he has fist-hand knowledge of my technical limitations since he’s seen me desperately struggling to follow the conversation in our Terminal Server MVP meetings in Redmond. In fact, of the 255 attendees at Briforum, I bet I’m the only one who has never set up a server in his life. I’ve often said that there’s no customer problem so bad that I couldn’t come in and make it worse.
So you’re probably wondering why I’d even want to go to a technical conference in the first place? It was for the networking of course. I knew that many of the top technical people in the Terminal Server/Citrix world would be present, and I wasn’t disappointed. Unlike Citrix Summit or iForum, though, where I’m inevitably too busy with meetings or giving my own presentations to ever attend someone else’s breakout session, I ended up going to a bunch of them at Briforum.
And while some of the material was difficult to completely grasp, most was quite comprehensible. The sessions were useful, relevant and often entertaining. I even picked up some new buzzwords and concepts that will help in my sales pitches. The good thing about being in consulting is that you don’t really have to know how something works, you just have to be able to talk like you do.
From a logistics perspective, Briforum was an amazing feat. Brian and his two employees, Nicole and Emily were at Costco at 3:30 in the morning purchasing bottled waters and sodas for the event which was held at an old multi-plex theatre in Silver Spring Maryland. Briforum happened during the day, then movies were shown in the evenings. Brian’s team did it all - from printing out the attendee badges to setting up Wi-fi and high-tech video recording. A running Briforum.com Blog let attendees keep the world updated in real-time.
I do, however, have one gripe. Brian wrote in the conference manual “…instead of about ROI or TCO or some other marketing crap that no one here cares about.” I certainly understand his concern about keeping the forum technical what with limited time for sessions, but that doesn’t warrant the outright bashing of ROI for Pete’s sake. (TCO maybe…but that’s another article). In today’s environment, the coolness of technology is not going to drive its implementation. C-level folks want to see a positive financial justification before they consent to purchasing new products.
Despite Brian’s sentiments, at least a couple of high-profile speakers seemed to echo this fact. Doug Brown, who presented his incredible “Methodology in a Box v4.0 Preview” for Citrix MetaFrame 4.0 deployments, talked about the importance of having a business “ vision” in order to make a project successful. And even the brilliant hands-on engineer, Ron Oglesby, admitted that he developed a spreadsheet he uses for ROI calculations.
If you haven’t heard Doug and Ron speak, by the way, you’re missing out. Doug has this great “aw shucks” average Iowa boy persona that comes off really well…probably because it’s so genuine (well, certainly not the average part – but the rest of it). And Ron is a former military type that is as equally at home discussing the intricacies of low-impact atomic bombs as he is in the design characteristics of multi hundred-user Citrix farms.
From a marketing perspective, I’m really impressed with how Brian sold out the first Briforum and how well it went over despite a marketing budget of probably near zero. He received a well-deserved standing ovation during his closing remarks. And besides the networking, knowledge and fun, I figure just attending such an elite technical venue is bound to give a little boost to my credibility cache.
Steve Kaplan is principal of By The Bell, an ROI consulting firm focused on the IT centralization/consolidation space. Steve can be reached at skaplan@accessflow.com.
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A Marketing Guy Sneaks into Briforum