Re: COMMON - the week's over...

On 6-May-09, at 3:06 PM, midrange-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Sometimes I wonder if the Jon Paris type people lose business because of
this. Why hire him onsite for a week versus going to COMMON? Although I
bet if he was the sole reason you went to COMMON, on site would be more
cost effective and better training.

Hey - I'm a "Jon Paris type ..." !!

Do I lose on-site business - yes. Particularly if I point out to a client that for an organization of their size that COMMON (or some other conference) is a better use of their money. And yes, I have done that many times.

Some of the big names at COMMON probably pick up enough private consulting gigs on the back of appearances at COMMON to justify the expense as a marketing cost. That has never been true for us. We may have got one gig a year that way but that's about it. There are a lot of RPGers speaking at COMMON and so people have a wider choice. Also COMMON does not allow us to showcase the full range of our offerings (such aS DB2 AND SQL) because others cover that at COMMON. If you specialize in Domino or something like prefpormance tuning maybe you get more - I don't know.

Up until now the minimal amount of business that we generate through COMMON has been enough to justify the $1,000 or so that each conference costs us. The changes COMMON are putting into place means that amount goes up by $1,500 - $2,000 and it is hard to see a financial justification for that.

We will see - hopefully COMMON will be open to new approaches and we can all find some avenues that benefit all of the community.

Jon Paris

www.Partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com