Our take: Lockdown from the CRN perspective

Tom Wright talks through how the team at CRN has adapted to live in lockdown

Like everyone in the channel, and in industries across the world, we at CRN have had to adapt quickly to the new way of working.

This has brought with it a number of challenges that we'd never have expected to face, with many more likely to come.

But in finding solutions to these challenges, we've stumbling on ways of delivering content that we probably never would have used if we hadn't been forced to.

I spoke to CCS Media MD James Hardy earlier this week, who said the business wouldn't have dreamed of delivering training and enablement via video conferencing platforms before lockdown - but now they have, it's been more effective than ever.

It's a similar story for us. Before lockdown I don't think we would have ever thought to interview senior industry figures on Zoom and publish the raw footage on CRN.

Even if we had done this in, say, February, I think our audience would have found it strange.

But fast forward a couple of months and some of our most viewed content has been filmed in my kitchen.

The videos in our Zoom In series have been incredibly well received and the people that watch them generally watch till the end, which proves that it's an effective medium for delivering content.

We've taken this a step further now, and next week will launch our first virtual conference. Two months ago this would have been inconceivable, but various teams across CRN and our publish Incisive Media have pulled this event together in, essentially, three weeks.

To put this into context, organising an event like the European Channel Leadership Forum takes us the best part of year, so we've pushed ourselves to work faster but also realised the benefits that techology can offer.

It's also been easier to reach some of the most senior people in our industry for our events. We have good relationships with execs at many of the biggest resellers in the UK and most are happy to spare us some of their time - but this can be difficult for a physical event, when you take travel and scheduling conflicts into account.

On Zoom it takes them half an hour, which is partly why the speaker line-up for our DeskFlix event next week is one of the strongest we've had.

That said, the challenges have been material. Face-to-face events have become a sizable part of our business, so we've had to work hard to reshape these over the last couple of months.

Sadly an event like Fight Night is just not possible in the current climate, but our plan is still to run all of our other staple events in some capacity this year.

I think there's very little doubt that these events will become physical again once the government guidance allows, but the success of our virtual events, even so early into their existence, means that there has to be room for them once the status quo is restored. They offer too many benefits to just be treated as a stopgap.

I'd say the other biggest change for us, as it has been for many others in the channel, is the lack of travel. We get invited to most of the large partner conferences every year, which involves (too) many trips to Las Vegas.

As the online coverage of partner events continues to improve, the benefits we get from travelling increasingly come from speaking to the partners in attendance - rather than from the keynotes themselves. If anything, it's easier to write up a keynote while I'm streaming it at my desk than it is when I'm sat in the Venetian expo centre.

It's hard to see how this will play out over the next couple of years, but a lot of it will depend on the success of the virtual replacements taking place over the next few months.

What is clear, is that we in the IT industry have found new and innovative ways to serve the people that rely on us, regardless of the fact we haven't seen them in the flesh for some time.

In a somewhat shameless plug, you can hear stories from a number of CEOs and MDs on how they've adapted during our virtual DeskFlix event next Wednesday (27 May). You can register to attend here.