Ovum launches its ‘brief a ton’

We got an email from Carter Lusher (@carterlusher) during the bank holiday week-end announcing what could be a solution to the scheduling pains all AR pros are dealing with.

Quite simply, all analysts will be on the deck on a day (the 18th May 2011), at their London offices and available for briefings. So if you book early, you can brief a ton of Ovumites, probably why Carter calls this Massively Parallel Briefing a “Brief-A-Thon”.

See below for details.

What do you think? Would you like to see this initiative replicated?

—- Announcing the Ovum Brief-a-Thon on May 18th in London —-

When vendors heard that Ovum’s entire global IT analyst team was going to be in London for the Ovum Industry Congress they asked to host a briefing for multiple analysts at the vendor’s local offices. This is a great idea except that it would be inefficient for analysts to run around London for meetings. So we came up with the idea of hosting a Vendor Brief-a-Thon at our London HQ. That way we can efficiently book many briefings (up to 30, with analysts having six slots on their dance card) in a single day giving more vendors a chance for face-to-face meeting.

The value of the Brief-a-Thon for vendors includes:

Opportunity to meet analysts in person that maybe they only interacted with over the phone or email
Efficiency of a single briefing with multiple analysts instead of conducting multiple briefings because the analysts are normally scattered across many time zones
Face-to-face briefings offer different interaction dynamics versus a phone call
Feedback from multiple analysts about the topics being discussed

Cost to vendors – Zero.  This is a no-cost opportunity that Ovum is offering the entire vendor community whether or not they are clients or sponsors of the Ovum Industry Congress.

The Brief-a-Thon will be held on Wednesday, May 18th, in London. The briefings will start at 08.30 GMT and run through 4:30 pm GMT with each slot being 60 minutes. Time slots will be assigned to vendors on a first come, first serve basis. However, before a vendor is assigned a slot they will need to get at least one analyst to agree to attend the briefing.

To request a briefing slot or if you have questions about this special event, vendors can contact carter dot lusher insertthatfunnysnailsignhere ovum dot com or (U.S.) 1-650-274-8309.

Here’s a link to the directory of Ovum’s Technology (aka IT) analyst team.