Back From Gartner Midsize Enterprise Summit

Elevators Sorry if I have been a bit absent lately from the blog but it has been a really busy week. After I spent four days at the Midsize Enterprise Summit in Atlanta, I quickly swapped out my dirty clothes for clean ones, packed up my family, and then headed to the country to visit with my family for the weekend.

I anticipate that things will start to slow down a bit for me know which means that I will only be running at 150% of normal as opposed to the 200% of normal which I was at this past week.

Speaking of the Midsize Enterprise Summit, all I can say is WOW! I have to admit that I was quite skeptical at first. But can you blame me? I get a call from someone out of the blue saying that I was recommended by a friend for the conference and that all I needed to do was answer a few simple questions to see if I was eligible. I thought that it was a scam! But, after we talked for a bit, I started to warm up to the idea.

Gwen (the name of the person that I was talking to) then indicated that I was eligible for the conference. She then told me that I was a fully sponsored attendee. This meant that the conference sponsors were paying for my flight (over $500), my hotel (over $600), meals (over $400), plus the conference! And, if I would like, I could bring a guest that they would also pay for! One of the delegates and I did some quick math during the final banquet on Wednesday night (amazing food!) and we figure that the conference cost well over $1 million to the sponsors! Now my big concern was how much all of this was going to cost me in sales hype and “Buy now before it is too late!”.

So, how bad was the hype? I can’t technically say that it did not exist but what little that existed was easily bearable. It was more than offset by the wonderful hotel (Thank you, Hyatt Regency Atlanta), the amazing food, and the wealth of knowledge that I gained from the sessions and from time spent talking with my peers.

Just to give you a bit of a taste, here are some of the sessions that I went to:

As with any large conference, there was always more to take in than I had time for. Luckily, they provided all the delegates with all of the presentation slides and notes on a disk. It will probably take me two more weeks to go through all of the information so that I truly understand it.

There was also more swag than you could shake a stick at! Two guys that I met from my home city actually had to pay $25 extra for the overweight charged because all of the swag! I got pens (of course), flashlights, keychains, USB drives (Woot!), USB drive travel kit, carrying bags, golf ball retrievers, software, and more!

I was also lucky enough to win a few contests during the week to win some bigger prizes. I’m going to be sharing at least one (maybe more) with DCoT readers over the next few weeks so keep your eye on the blog!

If you are interested in going to the Midsize Enterprise Summit, I would encourage you to sign up for the next one which takes place Sept. 16-19,2007 at the La Quinta Resort in LaQuinta, CA.