WingateWeb’s offering is used by Fortune 500 and big name tech companies like Cisco, Intel, Microsoft and Novell to manage small sales conferences, large user events or even industry-wide conferences with thousands of attendees. Ton Karren, CEO of WingateWeb, sat down with Brad Baldwin of RockyMountainVoices to discuss his company.

Brad Baldwin: I'm here with Tom Karren, CEO of WingateWeb. Tom, welcome to the vidcast. WingateWeb has been around since 1998. You're one of these companies that started up during that Web cash-flush era that has survived. Congratulations, first and foremost.

Tom Karren: We used to say those were the salad days back in 1998. If you had a pulse if you could get paid to put stuff on the web back then.

Brad Baldwin: That's true. Not many of them survived. Congratulations for sticking around. Why don't you introduce WingateWeb. Tell us what WingateWeb is.

Tom Karren: WingateWeb is an event management technology company. Primarily what we do is provide technology solutions for live corporate events. That would be a conference such as Cisco’s event called Networkers at Cisco Live. A corporate event is different than an industry event. When people think of events, they typically think about tradeshows with really big exhibit halls, where you walk through with a plastic bag and collect the tchotchkes and goof off a little bit. Corporate events are very different in that they are a controlled experiential marketing environment. Corporations bring in their customers, partners, and employees for a weeklong event where they talk about all of their corporate technology, messaging, and have a party. It's an experiential marketing function for these corporations.

Brad Baldwin: Depending on the size of the company, those can be really big events and require a lot of coordination, such as managing the hotels, the travels, as fights, all of those things. That's what you guys do?

Tom Karren: Our software solutions help these corporations to leverage the live component of these events. It's an experience that they are trying to put on for their customers and they want to have their best foot forward. There are logistical elements, there are planning developments, there are a lot of kinds of things you need to do to get ready for one of these programs. It might take something like nine months to a year for a corporation to prepare for a live event like this. They only gauge us nine months to a year out to put our software platform in place and our service team to help them with all of the major components of planning and producing these events. We put together things such as registration with massive e-commerce programs through these events. You think it would be simple, put your information in, sign up and go to the event. There are hundreds of price points and complicated marketing customer specials and discounts. There's a lot of sophistication that goes into the e-commerce set up for an event and you may get anywhere from 5000-30,000 people going to one of these programs. So it's registration and all of the e-commerce associated with that, like hotel planning and management.

Another large area associated with producing these events is the content planning needs that the customers have. If you're going to have 5-10,000 people coming in for a week, you might want have something interesting to talk about. You can slide a little bit of your marketing message in there too, but if you don't have any content there they won’t come back next year. They go through a very sophisticated process involving sometimes thousands of people to produce hundreds of technical breakout systems. They use our systems to plan and produce the content for these programs. They will bring in hundreds of collaborators to put ideas in and they have the committee process to look at those ideas. Then session planners will actually create sessions and train the speakers and the presenters. They have a plan and schedule for everything and need to decide what the course schedule is going to be and the rooms that things are going into.

Brad Baldwin: And most importantly, they have to fit in the cookie and coffee breaks.

Tom Karren: Exactly, they must have some food in there and conference parties and some keynotes. They use our systems to put all of those elements together. On the attendee side, to allow attendees to wrap their arms around all of that, we call it the event within the event. If you're going to a program that has 300 sessions, how will you know which ones you want to attend? How do you create your personal schedule?

We've recently announced that we are going to be releasing a new product that will be helping customers plan their experience event better. That basically involves some social networking technology. We call it Event Link. The old way of doing this is going in and what sessions you want to go to, look at the catalog, maybe throw some sessions in that you're interested in to a shopping cart and then ask the software to create a schedule for you. That's a pretty good mechanism.

What's more interesting, I think, is for people to find who else is going to this event and who is like you and shares your interests. It could be an area of interest in terms of content, the kind of company where you work and your job function. Who is like you and what are they going to? Now you can start to socially network.

Brad Baldwin: I think that the best parts of the events are the networks that you make after the event are critical.

Tom Karren: It's a critical component to the live events. Otherwise, you could just do it over the web. This creates the opportunity to meet people and network a little bit.

Brad Baldwin: So, nothing speaks like a customer lists. Talk to me about who are your customers.

Tom Karren: We have some fantastic customers. We have been very lucky in that we started at the top. We got our start with Novell. Novell has a conference called Brain Share that has been a trendsetter for the whole industry. Novell grasped the concept of a corporate event and direct marketing through events and live experiences early on. Novell came in the late 90s and told us that they had a bunch of different databases that were used to produce these events. They wanted us to help get them on the web and put them into one database. We were able to help them do that and create a product around it and leverage that relationship.

We’ve also had relationships with Compaq, which became Hewlett-Packard. We added Intel and since we have been doing a lot of high-end consulting and customization work, we were able to really get the high-end needs of those customers built into our products.

We didn’t build our product in a vacuum and then ship it and hope people would buy it. We built it by talking to customer about what they needed and started tackling the hard stuff up front. Those early customers were fantastic partners for us. Since then we've added a lot of great customers. Cisco is one of our premier customers, along with Microsoft and many others. Recently, we’ve added some pretty neat customers that aren’t your traditional information and technology companies, but they are still big companies. We have GE Access, Visa, Autodesk who makes a pretty cool program called AutoCAD. We've got a great customer list. Actually, we have 50 customers worldwide that are all Fortune 1000 customers.

Brad Baldwin: About Intel and Cisco, they've got a lot of different product events, corporate events, so you can actually have a customer and actually support them in lots of different events, I imagine.

Tom Karren: Certainly. In a year, a customer like Intel may have 200 or 300 events. There are probably four or five of those events that are large customer facing events. They have partner events, they have sales events, and then they have meetings, they might have a road show where they take the content from one of these larger events and package it down into an afternoon or morning and will take it to 12 different cities throughout the year. You see a whole spectrum of different types of corporate event programs, ranging from the large conferences at a large venue to somewhere more intimate.

Brad Baldwin: A good friend of mine used to use the phrase “walk this dog around the block.” I want to walk the dog around the block. Customer calls you guys and says, “we have an event.” How do you guys engage? Do you drive that private label Web application? Talk to us about how that works.

Tom Karren: When a customer calls up and wants talk to you about our software marketing platform and how it can help them with experiential marketing programs and event programs, the first thing that we would do is try to understand what kind of programs they are trying to put together. We do have a couple different products. We have an event console product that customers use for smaller, more frequent events. And then we have our Conference Enterprise product for those large, Blockbuster corporate programs.

We do engage by private labeling our solutions. First of all, we’re an application service provider (ASP). I believe today that software is sold as a mix of product and service. It's hard to ship a CD and have the customer get value out of it. Typically the model is: we engage our customers by telling them about our platform and our professional services team, which is an account manager, product manager, and a business analyst. This can help you leverage and customize your experience for your customer through your software.

We definitely allow what we call white label. It's a little different than private label, because Cisco isn't trying to say that this software is theirs. They may say that this is a Cisco experience powered by WingateWeb. We white label all of our services and software. If you were going to go register for Cisco networkers on our websites, it has Cisco's branding on it. It might say powered by WingateWeb. But it's one of the reasons why people may not recognize our name. It's definitely branded for Cisco. All of the branding is for Cisco's partners, Cisco's clients, Cisco's employees.

And they are branded for the event experience as well. They will take their corporate marketing and typically create a brand like Brain Share or Oracle World for Oracle. There's branding on top of their corporate branding which is just for the overall experience. That's really what these event producers are looking for is a software solution that implements the industry’s best practices that's flexible enough and can create a unique experience for their customers that brands their company. So that's typically how we engage.

Brad Baldwin: Exciting. I go to a lot of events and I've probably used your system and haven't even realized it. It's good to put the whole technology in a box and understand it better.

Tom Karren: If they don't know our names, we’re probably doing our job. Check us wingateweb.com. That's the best place to go and learn about our company.