Along with Karen, Zoe and Stuart, I attended the IDC Service Management Outsourcing seminar in London on 25th June. http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=IDC_P18536
Over 100 delegates attended from a wide range of companies, a few of them are existing customers such as BP and Morrisons. I gave a 30 minute presentation on the common pitfalls of outsourcing software along with some solutions to these problems with the aim of the presentation being that an equitable partnership between customer and supplier is the only sustainable arrangement in the long term.
This customer/supplier – win/win relationship message was echoed by a number of other suppliers who gave presentations. Other suppliers included Capita, Verizon, Google (and one of their customers), Wyless, Xerox, Cognizant and MEDZ. Presentations focussed mainly around traditional outsourcing and off shoring, some were incredibly dull; hopefully mine wasn’t!!
Google’s presentation was related to their SaaS cloud offering and was definately food for thought for me. Very straightforward cost model and very competitive pricing for mail, calendar, office type tools, document sharing, anti virus, anti spam filtering and more.
One thing that struck me as pointless was how much time the large companies devote to talking about their own organisations. Some of the presentations wasted half of their slot on slides about how many employees they have, how many countries they’re in, how many offices… They could just say “we’re massive” and skip the whole intro. Conversely my presentation said very little about Smart421 which is a lesson for me next time.
Marketing and Sales will be following up the leads that we gathered during the day and also following up with the full list of attendees that IDC will send us.
It was a very successful and well organised event and I am hopeful that some of the leads will be converted to real business in due course.
Thanks to Joseph for getting there early and organising and packing away our stand, collateral, champers etc.
