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Hello, I’m Isabel Blakemore, Tech Journalist at UC Today.
Cisco Live was supposed to be held at the beginning of March, in Melbourne, Australia, but event organisers cancelled the conference, meaning 8,500 would-be attendees remained in their home countries. The same goes for Google, who also cancelled I/O 2020, a conference slated to take place from May 12th to the 14th, along with its Google News Initiative Summit.
Facebook also cancelled its annual developer conference F8 due to rising COVID-19 concerns, originally slated for May 5th & 6th. Starting off the trend of tech event cancellation was the mammoth of a conference, Mobile World Congress. The event typically hosts over 100,000 attendees from every corner of the world. GSMA, the minds behind MWC cancelled the Barcelona event because of the virus.
Some tech giants have taken what the World Health Organization (WHO) have now called a ‘pandemic’ as an opportunity to flex their technology’s muscles. Google said it would make its upcoming Google Cloud Next conference, previously set to take place from April 6th to the 8th, a digital conference. In a statement on the conference’s website, Google wrote: “We are transforming the event into Google Cloud Next ’20: Digital Connect, a free, global, digital-first, multi-day event connecting our attendees to Next ’20 content and each other through streamed keynotes, breakout sessions, interactive learning and digital ‘ask an expert’ sessions with Google teams”
Zoom’s also taking innovative measures, reinventing one of its U.S., events for analysts. The meetup was held yesterday using Zoom’s video conferencing platform. Several sources on Twitter even said Zoom provided lunch for virtual attendees, too. And Microsoft followed suit with its MVP Summit, transitioning the physical networking event into a virtual one. Due to take place on March 16-19, Microsoft avoided any further interruptions by keeping the original dates of the physical conference. Dozens of conferences have been cancelled, moved, or changed to digital events so far. The very fact that these tech companies are agile enough to change their entire conference structure is a real-world application that demonstrates the importance of UC and collab tools that enable remote work and event attendance.
Numbers of confirmed cases continue to rise, so much so that it would be useless to sate a figure here. Numbers are expected to rise once more testing kits make it in the hands of health ministries across the world.
Tech companies are also instituting travel restrictions along with much-needed work-from-home policies thanks to the Virus. Amazon asked its nearly 800,000 employees to halt all non-essential travel. Google followed suit, then Twitter, Salesforce. Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft told their employees they should also limit all nonessential travel both domestic and abroad. Even the huge annual event that is Enterprise Connect is now not going ahead as planned, but has been moved into August.
What has been a real help during these past few weeks, is UCaaS and VCaaS solution providers who have stepped up to offer their services free of charge for the institutions most impacted by Coronavirus disruptions. These systems have also seen a boost in user count. We are pleased to report that virtual events like our own UC Summit remain unaffected.
Read our original article for a full, updated list of the status of UC events around the globe.
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