With social distancing and stay at home instructions, we’ve all been missing out on highly valuable and extremely fun face-to-face trade show events this year. One of those trade shows that VMblog loved attending in person was ZertoCON, hosted by the team at Zerto. Before the pandemic changed everything, I was all set and looking forward to attending ZertoCON this year in Florida.
We’ve had some conferences cancelled, some postponed, and others have chosen to move things to a virtual event. Rather than cancel, Zerto opted for the virtual route, so interested folks won’t have to wait long and can still attend from the comfort of their homes. To find out more about ZertoCON 2020, VMblog reached out to Caroline Seymour, VP of Product Marketing, at Zerto.
VMblog: The pandemic has changed the way we all host and attend trade shows, at least in 2020. What’s it been like switching from a planned physical event to a virtual one?
Caroline Seymour: We’ve seen a lot of events become virtual this year due to the ongoing pandemic. While we will miss getting together with all of our friends, partners, and customers, we know going virtual this year is the right approach. For Zerto, and many other companies dealing with the same thing, some of the main concerns with switching to a virtual event are ensuring the digital environment is easy to navigate, and figuring out how to get attendees to engage throughout the “virtual event”.
VMblog: What have been some of the challenges of moving to a virtual event?
Seymour: I’d have to say the most challenging aspect was accepting we aren’t going to put on the event we all love so much in real life and accepting transitioning to meeting with our customers, prospects, and business partners digitally. So, really the challenge has been fully embracing the virtual format. For four years we’ve been building this event and it’s getting bigger and better every year. This year we have to approach it from the mindset of providing the same valuable content and sessions that we always have while doing so in a concise way that can be produced in a one-day virtual event. The biggest upside, though, is that more attendees are able to join from the comfort of their own home-we have seen over 3,000 registrations to-date-and, of course, it’s free!
VMblog: What type of things can attendees expect from the new virtual ZertoCON event?
Seymour: Attendees can expect the usual Zerto flair. We wanted a balance of technical sessions, customer insights, exciting new product announcements, and for attendees to come away with a deeper understanding of how to become IT resilient – and, of course, some prizes! A full agenda can be found on our website.
VMblog: What kind of topics will the event be covering? Any standout sessions? Any special speakers?
Seymour: Attendees will learn the actionable steps organizations can take to protect their data and reduce downtime. The Covid-19 pandemic brings new IT opportunities and challenges. We see digital transformation projects accelerating as digital is where businesses are interacting more with customers. But this, too, poses new security threats and we have sessions that show how to recover from ransomware attacks. Cloud projects- such as moving Disaster Recovery efforts to the cloud-have accelerated with the limitations of accessing physical locations, so we have ensured that we have sessions to help organizations on their journey to the cloud. The event will feature a range of industry, customer, and Zerto experts discussing how businesses can become more IT resilient.
Ziv Kedem, our CEO, will give a welcome address; Gil Levonai, our CMO and SVP of product, will layout our product strategy and roadmap with two exciting announcements; and Oded Kedem, chief architect will present and demonstrate IT resilience for Kubernetes and why adopting containers is crucial to any organization; and much more.
VMblog: Like past physical ZertoCON events, will you have partners and customers speaking as well?
Seymour: Absolutely. As with every year we love having customers speak about how they best utilize the Zerto platform and they are always well-attended sessions.
This year we will hear customer insights that focus on how they have dealt with recovering from ransomware, moving to the cloud, modernizing their backup, protecting containerized applications, and managing thousands of servers successfully. Customer speakers include United Airlines, Horizon Bank, IFDS, PruittHealth, and TenCate Protective Fabrics.
VMblog: Do you have any special announcements being made that you can provide a sneak peek on?
Seymour: Zerto will be sharing two product announcements. First, we’ll be announcing that Zerto is bringing our leading Continuous Data Protection(CDP) to all application tiers, expanding the breadth and depth of our IT Resilience Platform. Second, we’ll be announcing that we are extending the benefits of our enterprise-class VM and cloud platform to next generation applications, enabling businesses to achieve resilience across all their deployment models. And as part of that we’ll announce Zerto for Kubernetes which is targeted to be released next year and will include continuous data protection, disaster recovery, and mobility for Kubernetes applications utilizing persistent data, running on-premises or in the cloud. This will make it easy to protect, recover, and move any Kubernetes application and its persistent data for accelerated development and delivery within DevOps workflows.
VMblog: It’s hard to replicate a physical show. Are there opportunities being made available for attendees to interact with Zerto, partners or each other virtually?
Seymour: Although they will be doing so from their own homes, it’s important to us that attendees are still able to have the chance to interact. We will have live virtual chats as part of the sessions with our experts on-hand to answer everyone’s questions and we will be providing virtual networking opportunities to encourage people to build relationships with peers, industry leaders, business partners, and Zerto experts.
VMblog: Hate to ask, but do you replicate the fun or party atmosphere of a live event? Zerto is famous for parties, entertainment, prizes, etc. Attendees love the fun and tchotchke at physical trade show events, can you provide that to a virtual event like this?
Seymour: Just because it’s virtual doesn’t mean it’s any less fun! Zerto will still be issuing its annual partner awards, and we’ll be giving away prizes for completing challenges with a few of our sponsors. The grand prize is a $750 AMEX gift card! Don’t worry: even if you don’t snag the top prize, we’re also giving away a $500 AMEX gift card, a Yeti Tundra Haul cooler, a Zerto JBL bluetooth speaker, a Zerto MiiR insulated tumbler, and no ZertoCON would be complete without our beloved annual Zerto t-shirts, so we’ll be giving 200 of those out, too.
We’ll also have a social wall where attendees can use #ZertoCON to engage; follow updates from fellow attendees, sponsors, and speakers; and participate in our fun social media contest!
VMblog: How can people get involved? Where can they sign up?
Seymour: It’s easy to get involved. ZertoCON is an all-day event taking place on June 10. You can register for free here: https://www.zerto.com/zertocon/
##
