Demo Conference--It's Like Hoosiers

I'm at Demo's new home in Tempe, AZ.  The conference begins tonight, but I love the day before the curtain raises as much as I usually enjoy the conference itself.

Demo is the stuff that dreams are made of.

It's like the movie Hoosiers.  When the basketball team from Nowhere, Indiana gets selected for the big tournament, they walk awestruck into this professional stadium with more seats than any of them had imagined.  The coach (Gene Hackman) takes out the tape measure and shows the team that the baskets are the same height from the floor and the foul line is the same distance from the basket as they are back in Nowhere, Indiana.

Today as I do every year, I snuck into the general assembly room where 60 or so companies will be presenting over the next two days in six minute chunks. Their eyes go wide at the size of the room, the hundreds of empty seats that will be filled tomorrow. They see the professional quality dais bookended by two seemingly iMax Sized screens where their faces and technologies will appear tomorrow. Mouths open agape.

Most of these 60 r so exhibiting teams are relatively new to big time tech presentations.  They have been clustered in underfurnished rooms all over the world, pushing their technologies, refining their talks for months.  They've lost sleep. Their have been glitches and delays.

Yet, tomorrow it will be like the Hoosiers in the big game.  They just need to do what they've been doing.  They just need to remember that the fans out in the audience for the most part, are on their side.  Then they just need to put it through the basket when it is their turn. Good teams and good technologies perform well regardless of whether the venue is Nowhere, IN, or Tempe, AZ.

The drama is not imagined.  There will be winners and losers here and for the most part, each exhibitor feels the pain and hope of their demoing peers Yet each desperately wants to win.