Seven Editions of IT Press Tour in 18 Months

The IT Press Tour, a media event launched in 2010 by Philippe Nicolas, announced the participation of 48 different sponsors representing 62 sessions and more than 1,000 media coverage.

Media coverage includes press articles, online and print, blog posts, video and tweets. Some sponsors participated several times thus validating the model.

"On average, statistics show 20 media items per company in the three months following our visit," said Philippe Nicolas, owner of The IT Press Tour. "Sponsors realize the right format, the great benefit and the immediate ROI without any risk for a very cost-effective price. It improves a better brand recognition, product visibility and solution adoption with any specific effort except joining the tour. It's all about a win-win model across sponsors, press and the organizer. For some sponsors, it generated enough coverage to start indirectly some business development effort with European partners or even end-users wishing to distribute or to try solutions."

Many companies validate the approach and support the model. Among them, Coraid, who trusted it since the beginning and the company continued to participate to a few editions.

Kevin Brown, Coraid CEO, confirms his interest: "The Press Tour provided an exceptionally efficient way to connect our senior executives with a broad array of technology journalists and thought leaders. The European market is very important to Coraid, and we felt there was a strong fit with areas of interest on both sides."

IT journalists also enjoy the tour editions. "The tour concept is optimal, both from a content perspective and an agenda perspective. It allows us to discover new technology companies and to talk to people we usually don't meet in a very efficient manner. It is probably the best event in its category today, at least for us from the high tech press," said Christophe Bardy, journalist at LeMagIT. According to Chris Mellor from The Register: "The trip to Silicon Valley was the best press tour I have ever been on."

2011 is almost over and the event delivered seven editions in 18 months, a challenge that demonstrates the know-how of Condor Consulting Group and the team.

The IT Press Tour will continue in 2012 with a new format, France and European groups will be merged and the tour will become an unique global European event.

For 2012 three events are in preparation: March 26-30 in Silicon Valley, in Boston in June, and back in Q4 in Silicon Valley.

Sponsors by alphabetical order:  A10 Networks, Arista Networks, Arkeia, Backblaze, Backupify, Blade Network Technologies (before and after IBM acquisition), Box, Caringo, CDNetworks, Cloudera, Clustrix, Copiun, Coraid, DataCore, Egenera, eMeter, Emulex, F5 Networks, Fusion-io, High Cloud Security, Hortonworks, i365 (now EVault), Isilon, Joyent, Librato, Lookout Mobile Security, MapR Technologies, Nexenta, Nimble Storage, NimbusDB (now NuoDB), Nine Technology, OpenStack, Palo Alto Networks, Panzura, Plug and Play Tech Center, Proofpoint, Pure Storage, Quantum, Sanbolic, Scality, SolidFire, Solix, StorSimple, TwinStrata, Virtual Instruments, Zadara Storage, Zoho, and Zscaler.