IDC Directions 2009 - Content Rich, IT Poor

I attended IDC's Directions conference in Boston earlier this week. This was the East Coast version of its West Coast twin held earlier in the month. According to one of the hosts, John Gantz, Chief Research Officer and SVP there were over 800 people in attendance. The rumors of the demise of the technology industry in this economy must be greatly exaggerated.

Credit to IDC for herding dozens of their analysts and hundreds of senior technology industry people into the Hynes conference center. It must have been the content. This is the first conference I've attended in a long time where there was more information of value than I could consume.

Networking opportunities were plentiful despite the openness of the space, and IDC analysts were readily available and approachable.

Not surprisingly, many of the attendees from software and technology companies that I spoke with are seeing their sales pipelines slashed and even existing contracts renegotiated. You see declines in tech spending mimic pretty closely declines in GDP, again no surprise.

The good news - at least from my perspective - is that good products, people and companies always seem to flourish in adverse environments and those that aren't...don't. Gantz was very optimistic about the future and I hope other attendees took that to heart.

We'll post more on some of the specific presentations over the next couple of days.