Sift Media should be congratulated for organizing a standing room only event: aka Business Cloud 9. 400+ booted and suited attendees had the opportunity to listen to the great and the good on the sell side along with buyers experience of SaaS/on-demand/cloud computing for the first time in a way that should have left delegates feeling sated and gagging for ‘cloud’ solutions.
I say ‘should’ because some of the talking heads fell short of delivering a realistic let alone balanced view of the SaaS/cloud landscape. The vicarious attacks at SAP for example were at best ill informed and at worst nonsense, something I picked up with certain analysts. It was clear to me for instance that some invited speakers had a limited understanding about SAP saas offerings, yet were prepared to pontificate to a captive audience.
Other speakers swept aside important issues around governance and security as though they don’t matter, let alone exist. I wouldn’t mind if it wasn’t for the fact that one particularly bloviating speaker hasn’t implemented what he was talking about. In Twitter parlance #fail.
These kinds of thing are worrying yet indicative of a media that needs to present a picture where all is sweetness and light. Needless to say it didn’t run entirely to plan. One large brand recognizable retailer vendor for instance said this about the show: “Another example of an event where vendors are positioned as able to suck money out of you for questionable reward.” That was harsh but indicative of what some saw as thin content. As someone who is priveleged to visit US events, I was shocked to discover by how much event organizers had missed some important audience understanding of business critical issues. But then this was a first time event of its kind and nothing ever satisfies everyone. 
As I said to one organizer who was miffed at my summation: “I’m not representative but if that’s what buyers are telling me then WTF?” As a side show, Sift tried to rescue its ‘pay for play’ deal for accounting software vendors as a ‘fringe’ event. Feedback suggests they didn’t do a good job, demonstrating little understanding of what the market or buyers need to hear and leaving vendors perplexed. To its credit, senior Sift management acknowledged this was a SNAFU but didn’t offer a way forward that might work. The word I consistently heard was ‘We’re going to work this out.’ Promising ideas for the future? I hope so.
Many senior Sift people with whom I’ve crossed swords in the past approached me during the event. They’re nice people who I am sure are well intentioned. It is clear they’re trying to find a way of settling the buyer/seller/publisher issue. As a content producer, I have a lot of sympathy for that conundrum. We all need to get paid. It’s a tough issue that publishers and content providers have yet to understand. I have less sympathy for the advertising/lead generation based model of imparting less than best information or at worst information where the publishers don’t care. That approach doesn’t take the buyer into account despite protestations to the contrary. I gave my thoughts on the issue to those prepared to listen but I kept hearing a harking back to advertising/qualified leads arguments. Sift has this utterly wrong.
If its vendor/advertising masters think that media is about qualifying leads then great but what does that mean for content value upon which buyers can rely? Sift has a community database of 600,000 people, something that is worthy of mining. The ability to garner a clutch of leads is obvious. That’s a place they can valuably fill of which vendors will, from time to time, wish to avail themselves. But it is not what I hear buyers wanting to understand in the business buying cycle.
As I said to Sift people, content isn’t about seller PR. It’s about informed and substantiated review/evidence of what the market is about. At times that means biting the hand that feeds. Despite vigorous defenses leading to one person saying: “I don’t care what you think,” Sift or rather media generally needs to think again. Am I over reaching? One late arrival had come from an event where the ‘rules of the day’ precluded live blogging. He wasn’t a happy person. Business Cloud 9 excluded live video recording by anyone except their own media. Command/control?
When an event is put on where multi-million pound IT spending attendees say to me: “Do they really think it is all that simple?” then you know there is gap between hype and reality. That is an observation that speaks more to understanding the reader but is indicative of a vendor led agenda. Media is not alone in this.
As I said at the top of this post – full credit to Sift for opening the topic kimono, attracting a full house and lining up a roster of (mostly) well informed speakers. But…it has to find a different way of ‘selling’ cloud computing if it is not to mean that attendees walk away with the ‘Chinese Meal’ effect. One good burp and it’s gone. For all our sakes it has to be a model that allows media the opportunity to take a balanced view. Otherwise all we get is the digital equivalent of a diet where the main course is low quality reality TV.
