Thinking of building your own virtual events platform? What business are you in???

Years ago I was selling data center equipment to one of the world’s largest entertainment and media companies. I’ll never forget the day I walked into an executive’s office to discuss their growth plans, and he looked at me with this frustrated expression and said, “I don’t know why we’re in the business of running data centers. We’re in the entertainment business. We have to rethink this.”

Now, this conversation was in the mid 2000’s, long before SaaS solutions became the status quo. People were buying servers, and storage systems, and renting colo space in Ashburn and El Segundo. But here was a customer lamenting that he had a team of hundreds of people across the country managing switches and routers and cabling systems to keep their enterprise applications running.

He just wanted to make movies and TV shows. Not monitor WAN bandwidth performance.

I’ve thought about that conversation a lot recently. Let me explain.

In 2020 most companies either canceled their events or took them virtual. At a minimum, events turned into zoom webinar sessions. Better than nothing! But lots of companies realized that events should have branding, and registration, and should be special experiences for the attendees. So how do you accomplish that?

It’s really tempting to hire some developers and UX designers and build out a virtual event platform exactly how you want. And I know many companies have done that. First, I want to say sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands and make magic happen. So I really admire many of the organizations that got creative and built incredible virtual events.

But if you are confronting this question right now, the question to ask is “What business are you in?” Do you want to be in the business of building software for managing the complexities of live stream integrations, attendee registration, event page creation, and event communications? Like my old customer who woke up with hundreds of data center engineers, you may find yourself managing systems and processes that are totally disconnected from the REAL business you are in.

At this point I can say with high confidence, that whatever your virtual events requirements are, there are platforms that can support you. And they LOVE managing the complexities of building and delivering software to meet your needs. They’ve/We’ve chosen this business. Let us do it for you! Whether it’s Parcy or someone else, the bottom line is that you really don’t have to do all that work these days. It’s a rich marketplace. If we can help you, great. If we can’t, maybe we can steer you to someone who can?

What business are you in? Don’t lose sight of it.