Posted Tuesday, December 8, 2009 by Louise Miller

We just came back from EIBTM in Barcelona. As always, it was a vibrant trade show, filled with interesting and productive meetings with customers, partners, and prospects in the meetings and events industry. 

If you did not have a chance to attend, we would like to share the Industry Trends Report, written by Rob Davidson and launched at EIBTM:
http://www.eibtm.com/files/2009_eibtm_industry_report.pdf

Some highlights that resonate with our own experience include:

On Technology Trends

Not surprisingly, the industry is looking primarily for technology to reduce meetings and events costs. Though virtual meeting technology is on the rise and helping expand face-to-face meeting opportunities, it is clear that it still does not compete with the value of personal contact and face-to-face meetings. On that note, the FutureWatch 2009 respondents expressed greatest interest in technologies that enable them to:

• Generate better attendee feedback on the meeting experience
• Provide better Internet access onsite
• Introduce customer relationship management (CRM) programs or improve their existing ones
• Improve the audio-visual experience onsite
• Facilitate the request for proposal process
• Identify and evaluate vendors, destinations, and venues
• Facilitate wireless networking and other forms of onsite communication

To expand on the last point, integrating social networking technology into the texture of physical meetings was not surprisingly a hot topic of conversation at the exhibition. We were delighted to see our partner, Pathable (represented by CEO Jordan Schwartz), being awarded the Technology Watch award this year. Congrats to Jordan and his team!

On Sustainability

We launched our “Greener Events” initiative during the exhibition, and received very positive feedback and interest from many different players in the industry. The EIBTM Industry Trends Report highlights interesting recent statistics from the 2009 EventView North America survey:

66% of respondents (300 senior sales and marketing executives) planned on implementing - or had already implemented - green initiatives within the event function – a 32% increase from the 2008 results. Of that 66%, 44% were doing so as a result of a corporate responsibility mandate.

We are glad to see such a rise in interest in planning and managing greener events, and are looking forward to following the debates at the COP15 conference this week (another major event enabled by Certain Software technology).

We hope you enjoy the thorough report Rob Davidson put together!