By Stuart W

With budgets tighter than ever it’s hardly surprising IT vendors are  questioning the value of trade shows.  They’re expensive, involve a huge amount of work and are often difficult to justify in terms of the number of sales leads generated. Despite this, having recently attended the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Hamburg it’s clear to me trade shows still have an crucial role to play, especially when it comes to the most important part of business – building relationships.

The first ISC took place back in 1983.  Back then it was a small affair with around 80 participants.  This year, the event attracted around one thousand five hundred participants and is widely regarded as one of the most important supercomputing events in the calendar.  Vendors exhibiting at the June event included some big players including AMD, Dell, IBM and Intel with a keynote speech given by legendary co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Andreas von Bechtolsheim.

Some would argue that trade shows are nothing more than an opportunity for a lot of vendors to plug their latest products.  This view, however, does not convey the real value of such events.  For vendors, they are an opportunity for a whole community to get together, discuss industry issues and share ideas.  For potential customers they are a chance to meet the people behind an organisation, speak to senior executives they might not normally get to meet and ask questions face-to-face.  And for the media they’re an opportunity to meet a lot of vendors in a short space of time and catch up with executives they might normally only get to interview over the phone.

The common theme running through all of these points is that industry get-togethers present a valuable opportunity for vendors to build relationships with people in a way that just would not be possible through other forms of communication.  Given the popularity of trade shows like ISC, I guess it’s more a question of can you afford not to attend.