SWsoft Builds Relationships at EventBy Liam Eagle, theWHIR.com
May 10, 2007 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The event went by quickly. SWsoft’s (swsoft.com) Global Hosting Partner Summit, the second installment of the company’s now-annual partner and customer gathering took place during a very busy two days this week in Reston, Virginia.
Not a typical industry event, SWsoft’s summit is a gathering for the company’s partners and customers – a venue for the company to inform customers about new features and future expectations, to discuss its products and their business models.
Kurt Daniel, SWsoft’s vice president of marketing and alliances, says the growth of the event from year to year has been better than expected, with attendance numbers well exceeding 200.
“We had attendance targets of 200-plus people,” says Daniel, “and we met or exceeded that. We had well over 300 registrations, and then actual people there wasn’t quite 300, but it was well over 200.”
The audience, and the unifying characteristic that every attendee was either a partner or a customer of SWsoft’s, enabled the company to organize a program that dealt with issues that were fundamentally relevant to that audience.
Conference sessions took place in both business and technical tracks, with the technical sessions understandably addressing the detailed technical issues surrounding products like Plesk and Virtuozzo, in a mostly question-and-answer format.
The business sessions, on the other hand, dealt with the existing and emerging business potential of SWsoft’s products – particularly how virtualization and automation can power the solutions that will meet the newly-forming demands for software as a service.
Discussions of its products and their road maps was one of the major objectives of the event, says Daniel, but the most significant outcome for the company was the building of relationships with the people the company does business with on a day to day basis.
“These are people we’re working through the phone and email with all the time,” he says, “and they’re scattered all around the world because it’s such a global industry. So just having a personal connection is great. Being able to meet together and brainstorm issues together while we’re there – we had this reserved executive board meeting room and it was packed the whole time. A lot of our top accounts were in there discussing things with our senior people. Also, they become aware of new opportunities through the range of external speakers we had in there.”
SWsoft’s partner summit is not a money-making event, says Daniel, and sponsorships included, the event is likely to still produce an expense for the company. But the value of the advancing relationships with customers, he says, while not necessarily quantifiable in terms of dollars, is the real value that SWsoft takes away from the event.
“It’s something we can’t measure perfectly,” he says. “But if you look at the partners that are there, the providers, and you look at the size of their business with us, and even if that increases 1 percent, that’s going to be significant. What I do know is that it isn’t a spike. So we had the event last year, everyone loved it, and our revenue consistently grows. So it wasn’t like July was amazing and then August was terrible. You don’t get a launch effect.
“Our business keeps growing, and hopefully part of that is because of the summit, but it’s due to a lot of other stuff as well.”
