How did we pull it together - INTEGRATE 2020 Remote

Top-level stats: From idea to execution in 7 weeks, 900+ paid attendees from over 50 countries.

When things unfolded due to the COVID-19 situation, we were forced to cancel this year's annual INTEGRATE London event. Our London event is the flagship event in the Microsoft Integration space, it attracts around 500 people from across the world. This is our 9th anniversary of INTEGRATE.

Previous INTEGRATE videos: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016

We didn't have much choice, we pulled the plug. That decision was not easy because an event of this magnitude requires over 6-8 months of planning.

What's next?

We had two choices, either to simply cancel this year's event and move on, or do something.

We were carefully watching what's happening to some of the large tech events like Microsoft Ignite, Build, etc, and soon realized everyone is moving their conferences online. We quickly reacted and announced INTEGRATE 2020 Remote on the 6th of April.

We didn't change the original INTEGRATE event dates, we stuck to June 1-3, which means we had only about 7 weeks to market and run this conference.

When you run a startup, it's not uncommon to face regular challenges. This is where the power of a dynamic team comes into the picture. An example from the past Startup’s requires a Team of Brave Warriors to succeed how we pulled together getting Microsoft Gold Partnership in 8 weeks.

We set an internal benchmark of bringing 1000 quality attendees to this conference. Running user groups and events for over 10 years, we have learned bringing any kind of audience to an event is easy, but bringing high quality targetted audience is harder.

We wanted to add value to all the attendees as well as all the Microsoft Product group speakers and us (the event organizers). So we made the brave decision to make this event a paid one (a nominal fee of about $100 for a 3 days event). This is the easiest way to bring a quality audience, if someone is not interested in the content they won't spend that $100.

How did we market the event?

Now we have this mammoth task of bringing 1000 attendees to the event within 7 weeks.

For us, it's always the same between product marketing and event marketing. The same principles apply. I'll say event marketing is even harder because you are time-bound and you can't make too many mistakes.

The first thing, we wanted to refresh our event branding, we wanted to show something fresh. We understood, if we don't refresh the branding we risk "ad freezing" a psychological term where you get used to an advertisement and stop paying attention anymore.

Our design team pulled a brand new creative to "INTEGRATE 2020 Remote". We are fighting against time, so there is no room to start it from scratch.

So we decided to adopt someone who is already doing it well (but not in the same field)

“Good designers copy, great designers steal.” - Pablo Picasso

It's very common in the design world, you always start from a base not from scratch (you don't want to reinvent the wheel). Running a multi-product company helped us to pick up some ideas from the startup ecosystem and bring it to the Enterprise ecosystem. We simply adapted our branding from a global SaaS event called SaaStock Remote. We didn't copy like for like, we just took inspiration on little things like naming, logo design, positioning, etc.

In terms of bringing the audience, it's a classic aggressive digital marketing. It's impossible to organically bring 1000 people to your event. It required a significant ad budget. Also, being an authoritative voice in a specific niche helped us to quickly spread the message and gain attention.

Teams

We put together an event team to deal with various segmented activities to deliver INTEGRATE 2020 Remote.

• Content team - dealing with speakers and finalizing the content
• Sponsor management - dealing with closing new partners and onboarding them.
• Tech team - finalizing the event platform and running it.
• Marketing - the end to end marketing with a target of 1000 attendees
• Accounting - deal with registrations, refunds, etc
• Support - during the event with close to 1000 attendees you get all kind of questions (our attendee guide built using Document360)

The technology behind the scene

The next big unknown for us "How are we going to deliver the event?". Running an in-person event has become almost like a walk in the park for us now. Since we have been doing it for many years, we know exactly the process like venue negotiation, different vendors like video production, catering, evening parties, marketing logistics, etc.

But changing the platform from in-person to online means we are back to square one. We need to learn everything from scratch with zero room for error.

As a company culture, quality is paramount on whatever we do. Whether it's the product, office setup, or an event. We wanted to give a fantastic experience to our attendees, we wanted to make sure no one should feel they wasted their $100.

Of course, for a great event, you need great content. We are confident with our speaker's line up and the content team that will be taken care of. Now the responsibility is in our shoulder to deliver that great content to the attendees.

We evaluated various options, I attended many online events to see how it's been delivered. I have seen a few events were the event was run in a pre-recorded mode. All the content was recorded before the event, and they just played it in sequence. It was boring.

After evaluating various webinar options like running it via Microsoft Teams Live, Zoom Webinars, GoToWebinars, etc we discovered the option to run real virtual conferences. There are a few products in the market, we decided to go with Hubilo. This brought in the real conference experience to the virtual event. I have recorded a short video to give you an overview of the platform.

Day 1 response

You can do whatever preparation you can, but running an event is like producing a movie (which I have experimented with as well - Mahira). The audience is the final judges. You need to pull everything together in one direction and hope for the applause from the audience.

After 7 weeks of hard work from the entire team, we are super excited to see comments like this flooding in Twitter

You can see the full Twitter stream for the hashtag #integrate2020

Initially, we thought people might drop-off, but we were surprised to see the constant engagement and attendee presence throughout the conference. Even the last session which as at 7 pm UK time had an engaged audience.

Important Announcements (Day 1)

There were some major important announcements made throughout the day. Some of the highlights

1. Azure Logic Apps new designer early preview
2. Azure Logic Apps on Function runtime
3. Automation Hubs (running on top of Azure Logic Apps)
4. Dapr and Logic Apps Integration
5. Azure Logic Apps SDK
6. Building Logic Apps in VS Code (Develop locally)
7. BizTalk Migration tool (coming in Q3)
8. BizTalk Server beyond 2020 - Cloud-Native & Hybrid focus
9. Azure APIM - Self Hosted Gateway - to support Distributed API Management
10. Azure Event Grid on Kubernetes (running on the Edge)
11. Azure Event Grid - Security improvements (publish to AAD protected endpoints, Managed Identity, and Private Links - private endpoints for publishers)
12. There are some interesting facts about Azure Messaging reliability. Currently processing around 75 trillion messages a month with 99.99998% reliability.

Day 1 summary blog posts

In the meantime, our engineering and marketing team worked behind the scenes taking notes for each session and they summarized the content as neat blog articles. If in case you missed INTEGRATE 2020 Remote, this content will help you.

• Microsoft Integration Roadmap and new releases - Keynote (Jon Fancey)
• Event-Driven Microservices with Azure Functions, Event Grid, and Cosmos DB – Martin Abbott
• BizTalk Server 2020: Migration Path – Sandro Pereira
• 20 Years In – Solving Today’s Integration Problems with Microsoft Integration Technologies – Stephen Thomas
• What our integration roadmap means for you – Matthew Farmer
• Distributed API management – Vlad Vinogradsky
• BizTalk 2020 and beyond – Valerie Robb
• Developers and Logic Apps – Derek Li

Summary

Overall we felt good about taking the plunge and converting 2020 INTEGRATE into a REMOTE event. Otherwise, these 3 days would have been just another normal day for us. I feel super proud of our entire team who worked hard behind the scenes.