With the Summer coming to an end in Europe (boo!), it is time to start thinking about heading off to Orlando (6-10 October) and/or Barcelona (10-14 November) for the annual Gartner Symposium/ITxpo.
At the recent pre-event kick off meeting, Gartner was keen to outline that its events business is growing with 70+ conferences now on the schedule attracting over 50,000 attendees. The target set for this year’s Barcelona Symposium is 4,000 and Gartner estimates once again, that a third of the audience will be CIOs. Chief Digital Officers are also being targeted in 2013 and the theme: Leading in a Digital World will no doubt appeal to them.
Conference Chair for the third and final year, Debra Logan (Ed Thomson will take over the role in 2014 in Europe), noted that this year, more analysts from the CIO group will be in attendance than any other group within Gartner. Gartner’s aim will be to help the attendees realise the value of the technology they already have in place along with what they can add to help them achieve business value.
Event Sessions
As with every Symposium, there will be a Mastermind keynote by a thought leader in innovation, role-based tracks focusing on the research Gartner creates around the 10 roles it focuses on, Solution Provider sessions on the show floor to allow delegates to effectively ‘go shopping’ and a Maverick track covering specially commissioned research taking a look at something completely different – for example, whether Microsoft should kill off Sharepoint!
New Industry Track
The program this year has been expanded to include an Industry Track on the Sunday. Great if this appeals to you. However, it also means that AR Pros will need to give up part of their weekend as well as convince their Executives and other key stakeholders to do the same. Even if you don’t want to attend the vertical sessions, the keynote is starting at 09:30am on Monday making even an early flight from Europe impossible to get there in time.
Industry Sunday in Barcelona will be heavily promoted as the biggest new thing. There will also be 10 plenary sessions, new strategic initiative sub tracks on social, mobile and cloud with heightened mobility focus plus additional technology-driven interaction (polling and gaming). The Industry sessions will include:
Banking
Insurance
Government
Education
Healthcare
Manufacturing
Energy & Utilities
Keynotes
The Keynotes will see Dana Deasy, CIO and Group VP from BP and Keith Ferazzi, CEO author of Who’s got your back speaking. For the CIO lunch, Frans Johansson author of The Click Moment will be speaking.
In terms of messaging, once again, the high level messaging will remain the same across the two events however, in Barcelona the analyst population will be primarily from Europe.
Actions for now
For AR Pros, here is what you need to know if booking tickets/hosting stakeholders:
• Team send = five people or more (discounts and complimentary passes plus analyst time can be secured)
• Media Partners = FT, computer weekly.com, ZD Net. Access to the media list will be available a month before the event
• 86% of the audience has purchasing authority. UK and Nordics have the strongest attendance
• Booking system for the analyst one-on-one sessions is now live!
• Keynote starts at 9.30am on Monday morning so book those Sunday flights before the airlines raise the prices
• http://www.gartner.com/technology/symposium/orlando/agenda.jsp
• http://www.gartner.com/technology/symposium/barcelona/agenda.jsp
Gartner is also running an AR session on Tue 12/10 from 1500 -always worth going there.
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