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ECM/SaaS: Shrinking Attendance At Trade Shows
The annual Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) show has long been the showcase for vendors of document management, imaging and workflow software systems. AIIM has been around since 1943, originally known as the National Microfilm Association, and the tradeshow, especially in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s was always a huge and well attended event.
That wasn’t the case this past week at the AIIM show in Boston. While the show floor was big, the number of non-vendor attendees was not. The numbers echoed similar low attendance on the West coast last November at AIIM’s ECM West show.
As another data point, last week Wednesday in Santa Clara I attended SaaSCon. With the current buzz around SaaS I expected a large turnout, but was disappointed by a crowd of only a few hundred people. The floor of the exposition hall felt empy.
Granted that there are no hard numbers here, just impressions from observations, but there does seem to be a marked shrinkage in attendees.
John Mancini’s keynote at AIIM listed statistics showing why ECM is more important to organizations than ever before. SaaS is predicted to grow at a tremendous pace. You’d expect interest in these technologies to convert to attendees.
What’s going on? Maybe tradeshows are becoming victims of the Internet. Browsing a web site or viewing on-demand Webinars might be more informative, time-efficient, cheaper and less tiring than attending a tradeshow.
That is unless the tradeshow can be marketed and promoted as a not-to-be-missed event. The AIIM and SaaSCon numbers contrast dramatically with the recent turnout at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. There an unexpectedly huge crowd of 10,000+ people from around the world showed up paying as much as $1495 to enter.
