The global hi-tech events industry experienced the virtual equivalent of a train smash recently as most large-scale physical events postponed during lockdowns were shoehorned into mid-June.
The biggest casualty was SAP, which left 150,000 attendees of its Sapphire Now virtual conference hanging when its conference website crashed as the event began. Viewers were eventually redirected to Twitter, but only about 2,400 "got the memo" to watch CEO Christian Klein give his pre-debut keynote. He later apologised, blaming a third party provider of the conference facility.
The scale of online attendance at events has been a challenge for even the largest tech companies. SAP last year hosted 30,000 people at Sapphire in Orlando.The fivefold increase this year was unprecedented.
Many events were bedevilled by the poor home connections of presenters, resulting in video and audio breaking up. But the major advantage of virtual events is that all proceedings can be viewed later, on demand.
Last week also saw the virtual staging of the Cisco Live conference from San Francisco, and the SAS Global Forum from the data analytics company SAS Institute's HQ in North Carolina.
Several regional events aimed at the Europe, Middle East and Africa markets, including the AWS Summit Online and Salesforce Live: EMEA, joined the crush last week. Both highlighted the contrast of speakers with professional studio set-ups - such as the copybook appearance of Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels - and those speaking from home offices with average connectivity.
Apple gave one of the few flawless performances among the big names, with its Worldwide Developer Conference this week. Though it was prerecorded, that strategy had not served other companies as well.
Mimecast's two-day Virtual Cyber Resilience Summit sent a lesson to the industry giants on how to stage an event flawlessly - coincidentally with a South African at the helm. A comparatively small e-mail management company, with a market capitalisation of less than $3bn, Nasdaq-listed Mimecast was founded by CEO Peter Bauer and Neil Murray when they moved from Cape Town to the UK in 2003.
Less impeccable efforts included last month's Microsoft Build, which required delegates to jump through hoops to register and attend on Microsoft's own Teams platform, via a dedicated event account rather than their own Teams log-ins.
Most technology giants learnt just how different the virtual world is from physical conference halls and rooms.
