The Elcom Tornado struck the West coast of America this week. If it wasn’t our accents, or our software it was our cute Koalas and boomerangs that left a memorable impression at the Gartner Portal Content and Collaboration summit in LA.
Our trip started with a midday Saturday flight to L.A on V Australia and commenced in the lovely suburb of Brentwood L.A. John’s youngest son, Gideon chauffeured us around L.A. and we spent the day mooching around the shops of Santa Monica and generally taking in the local vibe (and of course getting our phones and iPads wired for 3G).
After that we checked into the JW Marriot in downtown L.A for the start of the Gartner Conference. This area of L.A is home to the L.A Lakers and we arrived the Lakers game was about to start and everything was buzzing with conference attendees and game fans.
Our first order of work was to check the booth and set it up with brochures and of course our Koalas and boomerangs.
After setup we went to our first meeting with our fantastic East Coast distributor WebTeks. Here is a picture of Tom and John after our dinner meeting at a nearby steakhouse.
Tom attended the whole conference as our guest and was brilliant in providing us with local knowledge and assistance throughout the conference. He was also great at engaging leads and bringing them to the stand.
An interesting observation in the US is that the vocab is slightly different. People still use the term Portals a lot and I head the acronym B2E (Business to Employee) when referring to their Intranets. Additionally most people I spoke with had requirements with significant scale, billion dollar revenue, 1000’s of employees and offices across the US and the globe. There seemed to be an even mix of Government and Commercial entities and I would describe their domain knowledge as ranging between low to intermediate. There was also a similar trend to Australia in that many of the attendees were aligned with the Marketing function as opposed to IT.
Other attendees included Sitecore, Ektron, Google, Adobe Microsoft, Oracle and Jive. Here is a picture of all the sponsors. Of course our good mate from Ektron Tom Wentworth was once again standing at his booth directly opposite us.
A few more pics…
The audience flocked to our stand to find out more about this quirky Australian company and they definitely loved our little Koala. He was so popular that on day 2 we started a twitter campaign for the best elcom/koala tweet. The prize…a boomerang. There is one thing for sure with all the noise we made we will definitely if anything be remembered .
Generally our days started at around 6am with networking breakfasts then speaking sessions and then conference floor networking followed by networking drinks, networking dinners and eventually you crash after an exhausting day on these comfy beds.
There was also some additional excitement because Lada Gaga was performing next door. We met a nice gentleman at conference called Raj. Raj works as a System Architect for the US Federal Reserve. Raj had no idea who Lady Gaga was but he decided to buy a ticket. I think he still recovering from the experience, especially because according to him Lada Gaga declared that everyone remove their shirts and the audience proceeded to do so. In Raj’s words… “this was very different to my last concert …. Andreas Bocelli”.
On the last night we were invited to drinks at the roof top bar at the Grammy Awards Museum which was next door out hotel. We were treated to a museum tour and of course us Aussies were the last ones standing at the bar along with the Irish and Indians.
In summary this was a very successful event for Elcom. We met many large US businesses who were very impressed with our offering and got quality facetime with the Gartner analyts. It gave us huge brand equity and allowed us to capture over 100 qualified leads. This is no doubt going to make Joshua Anstey very very busy.
On that note….a quick shout out to Josh. Having had the opportunity to chat with Josh over the last few days I 
can see he is working tirelessly to grow the business in the US under trying circumstances. We are only hearing about his successes of which there have been many but cold calling is a tough game and busy Americans are not shy to tell you go take a jump. I can also see that being by himself and the difficulty of time zone makes it really trying. So from all of us here us Oz…keep shooting for the stars Josh, I think I speak for everyone when I say we’re all extremely excited about this phase of Elcom’s growth and want to do whatever we can to support you and make it a huge success.
