SPARK 2013 by the Numbers

A few weeks ago we wrapped up the sixth annual Electric Cloud Summit: SPARK 2013. This year’s event was hands down the best we’ve done, with more content, more speakers and more attendees than ever before. For the first time we had invited keynote speakers including agile development and continuous delivery luminaries like Jez Humble (who literally wrote the book on continuous delivery!) and Gene Kim. We also had live streaming so that people who couldn’t make it to the conference in person could still watch and listen to the keynote sessions — if you missed the conference, you can watch the recordings now, and I really recommend that you do.

As usual, I did some analysis of the event once the conference was over. Here are the results.

Registration and Attendance

Each year since its inception, the summit has set a new record for total registrations, and SPARK 2013 was no exception with 186 people signed up. But even more impressive is the record 168 attendees — those people that actually made it to the conference. That beats the previous high of 146 from 2011 and is a massive 33% increase from the 126 attendees in 2012:

But that’s not the end of the story on attendance this year, because for the first time we offered live streaming over the Internet. That added an impressive 84 additional “virtual” attendees to the keynote session, bringing the total to over 250 attendees.

I think three factors contributed to the high registration and the better-than-90% conversion rate. First, there’s no doubt that the list of keynote speakers helped attract people to the event:

• Jez Humble, co-author of “Continuous Delivery”
• Gary Gruver, co-author of “A Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development”
• Gene Kim, author of “The Phoenix Project”
• Paul Rogers, Chief Development Office at General Electric

Second, this was the first time that the conference was open to the public rather than being exclusively for Electric Cloud customers. Finally, this was the first time that attendees paid to attend the conference — somewhat counter-intuitively, you can sometimes increase interest in an offering simply by charging more for it. I think this has to do with the perceived value of the offering: some people think, “If this is free, it must not be very good.” Plus, once you’ve paid for a conference, you’re more likely to attend because you don’t want your money to go to waste.

Repeat attendance

A solid 25% of the attendees in 2013 had attended at least one previous summit, slightly down from the percentage of repeat attendees in 2012, but in line with the historical average. Amazingly, three die-hard users have attended all six conferences!

Presentations

SPARK 2013 had about 20% more sessions than 2012, and again more of the content came from users and partners than in any previous year. Sadly I didn’t get a chance to see too many of the presentations since I was a presenter myself, but I did get to watch the keynotes at least. If you didn’t watch the SPARK 2013 keynotes yet, you really should. It’s OK, I’ll wait.

The 2013 conference had 35 sessions in total, spanning four days and three tracks, including all the keynotes, training and track sessions:

Origins

As usual, the majority of attendees were from the United States, but a respectable 10% braved international travel to attend in person:

Fourteen US states were represented — the exact number of states represented in 2012 and in 2011, but a different set from either of those years. If I didn’t know better I’d say this was evidence of some kind of conspiracy. As expected, most of the US attendees were from California, but about 20% were from other states:

Industries and Delegations

67 companies sent people to SPARK 2013, representing a broad array of industries. Some of those are the usual suspects, like software and telecommunications, but there are some surprises as well, like the 4 companies in the retail industry and the one in education. As they say, software is eating the world. Many companies sent only one representative, but just a bit more than half sent two or more. One large networking company sent fifteen people to SPARK 2013!

Rate of registration

Finally, here’s a look at the rate of registration in the weeks leading up to SPARK 2013. In 2012 I hypothesized that the relatively low attendance numbers were partly because promotional activity for the event didn’t really get started until about 9 weeks prior to the conference. I thought perhaps that was not enough lead time for people. But to my surprise, the same is true this year and yet we had significantly more registrations than in 2012. I still think we could get even more if we started promoting the event earlier, but obviously there’s more to the story than simply that. The good news is that the team behind SPARK 2013 is already planning for SPARK 2014, so hopefully next year we’ll see if I’m right.

Don’t miss SPARK 2014!

Overall I think SPARK 2013 represents a turning point in the evolution of the Electric Cloud Summit. In a way it’s like we’re finally “growing up”, going from a small, private event to a serious public conference. I can’t wait to see what SPARK 2014 looks like, and I hope you’ll all join me there next year!