Longworth’s Annual Conference: Where the Action is in IT
October 10th, 2006 by Paul Margolis
Longworth’s Annual Conference was held last week at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, MA. Over 150 professionals from the entrepreneur and venture community attended to discuss the latest trends in information technology.
This year’s Agenda reflected Longworth’s focus on new markets for IT. Selling large IT projects to large enterprises continues to be difficult. Meanwhile selling smaller decisions to other decision-makers besides corporate IT is getting more interesting. Think small and medium sized business (SMB), consumer, and selling to the individual within the enterprise.
Bill Raduchel began the conference with a keynote on Technology and Media. He provided an expansive overview of the many exciting developments in information and communications technology and described big opportunities in media, devices, applications, and new business models.
The two panel sessions at the conference continued the theme on new opportunities in IT. The panel on Small Business included Jana Eggers, Director, Intuit Innovation Lab; Gail Goodman, CEO, Constant Contact; Robert Keane, CEO, VistaPrint, and was moderated by Longworth Partner Jim Savage. All three companies represented on the panel are getting great results by focusing on small business services delivered over the web. The panel talked about what it takes to be successful selling to small business.
The other panel was about Enterprise 2.0 and how it will affect software companies. It was moderated by Prof. Andy McAfee, who has been credited with first using the term Enterprise 2.0 in his MIT Sloan Review article. The panel included professionals who are working on very interesting projects bringing Web 2.0 concepts to the enterprise including Rod Boothby, Consultant, Ernst & Young, author of Innovation Creators; Zoli Erdos, Program Chair, Silicon Valley Assn of Startup Entrepreneurs; Ismael Ghalimi, CEO Intalio, author IT|Redux, organizer of Office 2.0 Conference; and Jeff Nolan, Evangelist at SAP and author of Venture Chronicles. There was plenty discussion about how Web 2.0 concepts will be used in the enterprise and very interesting speculation about what will be the “Enterprise 2.0 Killer App”.
The Conference also featured presentations from Sermo and Scanbuy, two very interesting Longworth portfolio companies that clearly fit the model for success in a “2.0 world”.
Paul Deninger, Chairman of Jeffries Broadview, also presented at the Conference. He showed us the status of market for venture-backed companies and explained how, five years after the dot.com crash, the IPO market in the US has still not come back, and is unlikely to do so without structural changes. Paul explained how M&A is now the only exit opportunity for most VC-backed companies, and that changes lots of things about how companies will be formed, funded, and built.
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