COFES 2010 (Day 3) – Vendor Appointments

As part of the COFES Technology Suite package, a sponsor company gets to have one on one meetings with specific attendees. The organizers schedule the appointments At the time of registration every attendee is given a list of appointments that have been schedules for him or her. These meetings are scheduled on the third day in the same Technology Suite hotel rooms.

This year the sponsors were Autodesk, HP, Intel, Microsoft, PTC and Sescoi. I had appointments with Autodesk and PTC. The appointment with Autodesk was a one on one meeting with Teresa Anania, Director of Industry Management. I first met Anania at the Autodesk Manufacturing Tech Day event in Portland, Oregon last week. We had quite an interesting conversation back there. So this turned out to me more of a continuation of our previous conversation. I will be posting my interview with her on this blog some time later this week.

The PTC vendor appointment was a bit weird. Actually, all previous vendor appointments that I have attended since COFES 2008 were more of a sales pitches. I mean, the vendor spoke about some product or technology and I asked questions. If I found it interesting, I wrote about it. I am not going to write about what transpired in this particular PTC vendor appointment. Not because I found the things that the four PTC executives said to be uninteresting. But because I did almost all of the talking and they did most of the listening. As the meeting progressed, it slowly dawned on me that PTC had called me in to give them a lesson in Social Media. So I let them have it. I told them exactly what I thought about that Social Product Development thing that they have going on, which is probably best not elaborated here, although it would make for interesting reading.