I have attended Sys-Con’s Cloud Expo conference several times both in New York and Silicon Valley over the last few years, but last week’s installment at Manhattan’s Javits Convention Center seemed a mere shell of its former self.
Unlike the many thousands who attended the shindigs of the past, this one billed a count in the low thousands – although the keynote room held 500 at best. Furthermore, the show is no longer simply Cloud Expo – Sys-Con also bills it as Internet of Things Expo as well as a DevOps and Big Data conference, not to mention a bit of containers and microservices added to the mix.
Over the years, Sys-Con has proven adept at riding the wave of the latest hot buzzword, having timed their transition from SOA Expo to Cloud Expo just as interest was shifting to the Cloud. Why then the drop-off this year?
Perhaps it was lack of focus. To be sure, there are DevOps conferences as well as Big Data conferences that continue to attract interest and attention. On the other hand, there are quite a number of DevOps conferences these days, so the audience may have too many choices.
My guess, however, is that people are simply losing interest in attending Cloud conferences, and this conference still gives Cloud top billing. Don’t count Sys-Con out, however – they may decide to push the Cloud to the undercard for future conferences, but my sense is that they will select a headliner for future installments that will continue to draw people in.
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2016/06/12/cloud-expo-conference-short-on-innovation-still-provides-value/.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, Chef Software, OutSystems, and ServiceNow are Intellyx customers. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Dion Hinchcliffe.
