As major events such as IBM Think, DockerCon, and AWS Summit successfully transition from physical to virtual, unexpected benefits are coming to light. Higher attendance from a global audience, plus the chance to continue the conversation for longer than a few days in Vegas, are proving that going online is worth the effort.

So, it seems the real question is not “if” to virtual conference, but “how.” Showing one way to tip conference convention on its head was this week’s PegaWorld iNspire virtual event.

“The first thing we talked about is, we’re not going to take a three-day event and try to put it all online,” said Adam Field (pictured), global head of innovation and experience at Pegasystems Inc. “We know people’s time is valuable. Let’s figure out how to take just what’s important and get it out to people so that they’re inspired to move forward and engage.”

Field spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the PegaWorld iNspire virtual event. They discussed how Pegasystems broke the mold and innovated the concept of virtual events at PegaWorld iNspire. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following content has been edited for clarity.]

Let’s start with your role, as I love the title “global head of innovation and experience.” What do you do?

Field: We have a team, I like to call them creative misfits. We sort of bridge that gap between technology and creative. We do research on emerging tech and try to understand how our clients might use it. How it’s going to change the future of work. That’s the innovation side. On the experience side, we do things like for these PegaWorld events; we match where art meets tech. We build these experience things that people come and see at our events. We build all the demos and all the production that you see on the main stage. So, we touch a lot of different things around the future of where technology’s going.

Once you’ve decided to go virtual, the tough decision is what you want to preserve from the physical. Help us understand how you thought that through.

Field: I remember in that first meeting when we learned this was going virtual, someone stood up and they said, “Guys we’re about to live our tagline.” We go to our clients every single day and say, “Change is what’s going to make you special. Change is what’s going to make you different. Now is your opportunity; seize that change and run with it.”  So, we said: “We can’t change the world right now. We know we’ve got to go virtual; all we can do is change the type of event that we do. We’re not going to do the standard event that we think everyone else is going to do. Let’s do it differently. So, we took two days and we boiled it down in two-and-a-half hours.

We looked at all the areas where we go to market, and how people design and deliver their apps, and some of the tech like Pega Cloud that they use. And I went to my extended team and said: “Normally, you have 75 booths; we’re going to boil that down to 25. Normally, your demos might be 20 minutes; we want to make them seven. Let’s work together to figure that out.”

What was interesting was a lot of people came back to me and said, “I can tell that story in a much more crisp way and really show people what they need to see in a in a much faster timeframe.” So, what it really allowed us to do was find those bits that we thought were most important. Find those demos that we think are most important and just and bubble those up.

When people come to these events, they want to touch the tech. Normally, at PegaWorld you have the iNnovation Hub, which is where people get to play with the technology. How did you replicate that?

Field: We didn’t want to lose that interactivity, so we made sure that we included live components. For demos, one of the things we did was inspired by my kids. They are avid gamers, and they watch these Twitch streams. And I thought, we should be able to do that with corporate software. So, we had these live build sessions where we put some of our developers on the hot seat for 15 minutes unscripted. They were a little nervous at first, but they went off great.

It was a new format we had never tried before. If we keep doing these types of different things and we just embrace the moment that we’re in, I think people will really come to it and get some value out of it.

What are your thoughts now the event is over? What did you gain with virtual, and how do you think the virtual event is going to evolve?

Field: One of the things that you obviously gain is you can be more widespread. This event reached tens of thousands of people in dozens of countries. One of the other things that we realized is that we’re creating a lot of content. So, we have all this great content that anyone can go view. We have a lot of follow-up activities that we’re starting to launch right now.

I think the advice I would give is, try to take what’s great about an in-person event and put it online; but don’t try to replicate the event online. Some of the best things about in-person events are from the live nature of it. So, take the risks and do some live stuff. People will really appreciate that, and you’ll get a lot of credit.

In the early days, I think it’s going to be some live Q&A, but as we move on it’ll be real private rooms with experts that you’re able to have one-on-one chats and go through and bounce around and be able to talk to people you know, just like you would in real life — except, between two cameras instead of in person.

As months go on, expectations are going to be higher. People are going to have attended a lot of virtual events. So companies are going to have to keep upping the game.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the PegaWorld iNspire virtual event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for PegaWorld iNspire. Neither Pegasystems Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE