Article posted on Jul 07
For those that might have missed it, be sure to go check out the interview with Jason Mitchell from Wingate Web. As a follow-up, the transcript of that sessions is posted below:
JASON MITCHELL SEGMENT
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>> Steve Spencer: Hi, everybody. This is Steve Spencer from the Utah Tech Spotlight. I’m here today with Jason Mitchell from Wingate Web. Jason, thanks for meeting with us today.
>> Jason Mitchell:Â Thanks for having me.
>> Steve Spencer:Â And as we ever are with the Utah Tech Spotlight, we’re really out to bring more exposure to Utah and the really cool companies in Utah and really the reach and the capabilities of those companies and how it extends so very, very far beyond that.
Jason, I guess to start us out a little bit, can you tell us a little bit about Wingate Web and who you are and what you do?
>> Jason Mitchell:Â Sure.
I am the director of product management. I oversee the product development pipeline and process, kind of the features that we want to build from a strategic standpoint and based on our customer feedback. I also oversee the marketing activities as well. So I kind of wear several hats like most people do.
But as far as the company, we’ve been around since ‘98. So been around for 10 years now. And we play in the corporate event management space. We are not event planners. We don’t plan food and beverage. We have built technology
>> Steve Spencer:Â As you can tell, we
>> Jason Mitchell:Â Yeah, I mean we have built technology that automates every process involved in managing large scale conferences that involve thousands of attendees, hundreds of sessions, hundreds of exhibitors over a week’s period of time, typically.
Our typical size event that our technology manages is probably about 5,000 attendees, upwards of 30,000 attendees.
When you get into conferences that size, they have complex needs that you can’t just solve with commodity systems. So there’s a lot of people that do online registration.
There’s a lot of people that, you could throw up a website, capture people’s names, a little profile information, run their credit card and they’re registered for an event. But for these very intensive conferences, there’s a lot more information and a lot more logistics that goes into managing them to make sure that this event goes well. And that’s where our systems shine.
>> Steve Spencer: Sure. So I would imagine, not just a CRM, which, like you said, it captures your attendees, what they want to do, but also really manages not just your events within the event, but also quantities, I’ve got this many seats, who is signed up, who is speaking, and really the work flow beyond that as well, right?
>> Jason Mitchell:Â Exactly.
>> Steve Spencer:Â If somebody signs up, if I have to find speakers for certain things, what are the steps that need to happen and who needs to do those?
>> Jason Mitchell: Yes, that’s actually   that’s a good point.
One of the things we started out with, in fact, in ‘98 is our content lifecycle management application. At these events, from conception all the way down to actual execution on site, there’s a lot of steps along the way.
So they have a process called Call For Papers, which any customer, anybody can come in and suggest sessions. So, say, Cisco Networkers, for example, somebody wants to have a session on new networking devices, whatever. They submit, I’m Jason Mitchell and I’m really interested in this topic, here’s a speaker I would suggest for it. Here’s kind of some bullet points.
So you submit it through. So you get hundreds of these sessions, suggestions coming in, and then there’s a process, an approval process where different teams go through and they look through those and they go that’s a great idea. No, not so good. This one’s pretty good.
So then they kind of filter and whittle it down to a set of 100 sessions or 50 sessions that are going to be taught. And then from there, you know, it just gets   every process along the way is automated.
So the voting process, the approval process, the task management, assigning of speakers. And then once a speaker and a topic are assigned, then you’ve got all kinds of tasks that then a speaker has to fulfill before they can actually speak at the session. Some of those are submitting N number of drafts of their PowerPoint presentation, which is then approved along the way. Submitting their AV requirements. Submitting their shirt size, if there’s an official shirt they’re supposed to wear. All of that stuff.
And then once they get on site, the production of those PowerPoints, turning them into PDFs and making them readily available for the attendees to search and to look at during or after the event.
That whole process is one of our core applications that we’ve built on top of registration, on top of exhibitor management, on top of partner management and session scheduling and social networking. And I mean there’s tons and tons of other applications, but that was one of our core ones that we built first.
>> Steve Spencer: And add to that the value proposition of the reusability of it, right? Okay, here’s what I did last year. Instead of starting from scratch again, instead of winding everybody up.
You hear all the time about these companies that have staff that literally works all year long to put on an event. This makes it so much easier, because instead of starting from scratch all over again you’re saying I’ve got a template, I’ve got everything in place, let’s just go tweak, poke, tune what we need to tune but let’s leverage the labor we’ve done.
>> Jason Mitchell: Definitely. And we see that with a lot of our customers, where we will take their last year’s conference data and we will basically port over the stuff that they want to reuse. And it makes it that much easier. And we’ll see that as well where they’ll have an event series, potentially, where they’ll have a West Coast version of a conference and an East Coast. And it’s pretty much the same. And they’ll just go: I want this and I want it instead of West Coast I want it East Coast. So they’re just up and running and simultaneously.
>> Steve Spencer: You guys are an ASP, you’re not (inaudible) software. So no software to buy and install or any of that; they just use the stuff?
>> Jason Mitchell: No, it’s up and running. It’s all web based.
All you need is a browser and you’re up and managing your complex events very quickly.
>> Steve Spencer: So one of the other things that I wanted to make sure that everybody understands, and I already have some perspective on this personally, is really the reach of your company. Because my own company is a marketing agency of sorts.
And we work with companies to help them prepare their message, and preparing for events is part of that. So throughout the country we’ve dealt a fair amount with events. And I’ve dealt with other companies who do registration management and things like that.
And you go around the country, and Wingate Web is a name they know and, quite frankly, are spooked by. So I think it’s really important that everybody understand we’re not just talking about Utah events. We’re not just talking about a Utah company.
Even beyond national events, you guys have a very global reach.
>> Jason Mitchell:Â Yes, we do.
Actually, we have an office in Bracknel in the United Kingdom, have a small staff there that’s growing. But our AMEA business will probably be, this year I think it will be about 15% of our overall business. Might be a little bit more than that.
But I know that going forward, the projections are that the size of the business in Europe, specifically, will probably match our domestic business within two or three years. It’s even more fragmented in Europe, as far as the event technology providers.
And we’re finding that once we go in with a consolidated solution, that it’s not just registration, but it manages all the details of your events, that they’re clamoring it for it.
They have a lot of meetings going on. In Europe people travel between countries regularly. And they’re always going to different events. And so there’s a lot more events. They’re a little smaller than they are in the U.S., but there’s a lot more of them.
And we’re excited for the growth that we’ve seen, and we know we will continue to see in Europe.
>> Steve Spencer:Â So not only do you have a huge reach, but, really, the scope of the companies that you’re working with is very impressive as well.
Can you talk a little bit about some of the names or the shows that some of the viewers listeners/readers of the transcripts may be familiar with?
>> Jason Mitchell: Definitely. I think most of the companies we work with are household names in the tech industry. Any major tech company who has a sizable conference is most likely using our systems to manage those.
So, for example, Cisco Live, which is Cisco Networkers, large event, about 20,000 attendees. It’s actually happening next month in June down in Orlando. Cisco is one of our big customers.
EMC, as well, and all of their sister companies. So EMC, VMWare and RSA Security are all customers as well, and they have a number of conferences that they have. HP has been a customer for a long time. They were one of our first customers that adopted our entire platform.
Novell, of course we’ve done Novell brain share for years. As well, outside the tech space, we’ve got some traction in sort of the medical biotech industry.
>> Steve Spencer:Â That was huge here.
>> Jason Mitchell: And the education market with Cerner. Cerner Health is one of our customers. G.E. Healthcare.
And then as well in the finance, sort of vertical, as well, we do have some traction in there with some very large household name customers that I wish I could tell you about but I’d have to kill you.
>> Steve Spencer: You guys can’t see the guys in the suits standing just off camera. He means that.
(Laughter)
>> Jason Mitchell: So very large enterprise companies that we do business with. And they spend millions of dollars on their events. And for them to spend   our software is not cheap, you know. It’s over 200 to, some customers may spend almost a million dollars with us. It’s not cheap. But for a large customer that is spending $20 million for an event to run smoothly, it is a wise investment. And it definitely pays off.
>> Steve Spencer:Â I want to touch on that point just a little bit, because you guys do these big events, but really there is an opportunity for some of the smaller events as well, right?
>> Jason Mitchell:Â Yeah.
>> Steve Spencer:Â So if somebody’s viewing this later and were interested, how do they really know whether or not they’re your target market, whether they’re the type of event or type of customer that it makes sense to contact you?
>> Jason Mitchell: Right. And I should step back and talk about our two product lines. And the product that I’ve been talking about mostly is called Conference. And it is built to manage a large intensive conference of thousands of attendees, hundreds of sessions and exhibitors, that type of scale. And there is the ability for that product to scale down smaller to maybe a thousand to 2000 attendees with or without an exhibit hall. That’s kind of our Conference product. It’s a one and done type of system. You buy it and you manage your conference and then it’s done.
We have another product called Event Console. That’s where, I think, when you’re talking about going down into the mid market, mid to upper small market, if that’s even a market.
>> Steve Spencer:Â I like to think
>> Jason Mitchell:Â Upper small.
>> Steve Spencer:Â Not fat, I’m largely skinny.
>> Jason Mitchell: I’ll leave that one right there. I’m not going to   so Event Console, it’s a persistent system used to manage hundreds of smaller events.
So that one, Event Console will scale about up to a thousand attendees well with much smaller content management needs, much smaller exhibit management needs. Still very flexible registration. But that system is helping us get a lot more traction in the mid market.
>> Steve Spencer:Â So I’ve got an event coming up, single event, one time thing, maybe 500 people, I should look you up?
>> Jason Mitchell: Yeah, we would have to see how it would work. But with Event Console that’s something that we could service or potentially with one of our other product lines within our greater company.
>> Steve Spencer:Â So what have you seen as the biggest changes in the way that events and event planning and event execution and, quite frankly, event attendance, what do you see that has happened recently and what do you see on the horizon, where are we headed with this?
>> Jason Mitchell: I think face to face events, I don’t think they’re going away. And neither do our customers.
Neither do we as a company.
But what we do see is the ability to have more niche events. As I was explaining earlier about our presence in Europe, there are a lot of organizations, Cisco, for example, they have a large conference here in the U.S., but they are also having another conference in Europe. And it’s Cisco Live Europe.
So what they’re doing is distributing it to make it easier, as gas prices are getting more expensive, airfare is getting more expensive. It’s harder to fly back and forth across the pond.
We are seeing these more niche events being taken to outside of the U.S. into other areas. And one of the other things that I think is worth mentioning with events, a couple trends I’m seeing, is social networking. It’s changed our lives. I can’t live without facebook. I’m kidding. But you see there’s a lot of ways for people to interact.
>> Steve Spencer:Â LinkedIn.
>> Jason Mitchell: LinkedIn is a great example. It’s a business networking site. It’s got great application in the events industry. We’ve actually integrated with LinkedIn and facebook with our social networking application that’s integrated into our platform. The nice thing about having an integrated social networking platform that has been   it’s been very well received.
Cisco is using it. EMC is using it and a number of other customers, is that you control the data. And you can control the experience.
You know who the attendees are. You know all the profile information about them. You know, when you attend an event and register, you have to fill out a lot more profile data, a lot more than if you were to go buy a shirt on nordstrom.com or whatever.
With that data, we can then customize and personalize that attendee’s experience within the social networking realm, when you get on site everything from your badge, from how you interact with the event is personalized. So that’s one thing that helps us as a company is we own a lot of the data and we manage a lot of the data.
We can personalize the event exactly to you as Steve Spencer as attending Cisco Networkers Week and roll out the red carpet for you if that’s what the business rules require.
>> Steve Spencer: Good. Jason, I sure appreciate you taking a few minutes with us today. And thanks so much everybody. We’ll talk to you later.
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