Business of Software Europe - conference about IT business (almost) without Growth Hacks

Which of the foreign IT business conferences in IT can compare the semi-club ISDEF conference, widely known in narrow circles, and, in general, how correct are these comparisons?

In June of this year, Konstantin Kaplinsky, CEO of GlavSoft and Member of the Board The ISDEF (Independent Software DEvelopers Forum), deliberately traveled to Business of Software Europe in London and shares his impressions.

Business of Software Europe

I am interested in any ISDEF analogs. Business of Software Europe is the European branch of the conference: the first is held in Europe, more precisely, in the UK, and the second in the USA, in Boston. I planned to visit the European part two years ago. Then it did not work, however, I began to follow this event. As a result, this year it turned out to kill two “birds with one stone” at once, having traveled to London for a conference and at the same time visiting competitors in Cambridge, with whom we have good relations and with whom we wanted to meet in person.
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Business of Software Europe in its stated objectives and topics is similar to the autumn events of ISDEF . First of all, this is a conference focused on those who do business on software. Service companies are also represented on it, however they are smaller.

There are no market leaders — large multinationals — at Business of Software Europe. Small and medium-sized companies are represented (despite the fact that they have much more on average). Nevertheless, the scale of the companies is quite comparable with the scale of the business of the members of our club.

With regard to keynote speeches, then Business of Software Europe is trying to invite celebrities of world renown. This year Alexander Ostervalder, famous for his books on building business models , spoke. ISDEF, in addition, is organized by enthusiasts, and Business of Software Europe - a commercial conference, which has a large budget and, accordingly, the ability to invite eminent speakers.

Atmosphere of BoS Europe

Just like ISDEF, Business of Software Europe has a permanent list of participants who attend the conference year after year. A working atmosphere reigns, everyone knows each other well, communicates a lot, and gets to know each other freely. This is not like many other marketing and technical conferences where people just come, go, listen, ask questions. At Business of Software Europe, the atmosphere in terms of communication is very productive. The event begins with a welcome party, just as is customary at our ISDEF, and all two days the conference goes along the same lines.

Perhaps this is the difference of mentalities, but in Russia the participants are more relaxed. In the autumn ISDEF, not everyone goes to the reports, while in Business of Software Europe, when the speaker speaks, you won't catch anyone in the corridor. People paid money and are keen not to miss a single report. [From the editor: this year there were reports from Twitter, Swiftkey (now Microsoft), PipeDrive, Balsamiq and others. In general, there are far fewer speakers than ISDEF - less than 20 against the traditional 40-50 at our conference in the fall.]

Many abstractions

Business of Software Europe discusses how to create, how to sell, how to make the product more useful to the user. Legal and accounting subtleties are almost completely absent. In fact, this is understandable - they have no currency control specific to Russia, there are no problems with receiving money from abroad.

What turned out to be a lot at Business of Software Europe was dubious abstractions, which in Russia would have rather scared off the participants than interested. A lot of reasoning on how to properly think, how to imagine a user. Speakers discuss the values, culture, missions, ways of thinking that I would like to land a little.

Abstractions are needed, but it seemed to me that this was overkill at Business of Software Europe. In my opinion, all this is not well projected on a practical plane. ISDEF in this regard is a more practical conference.

What you can get from participating in Business of Software Europe

It cannot be guaranteed that participation in BoS Europe will be justified from a practical point of view. This is interesting in terms of expanding the horizons when looking for some new ideas. But to go there constantly is difficult, and will be more expensive four times. It is useful to go to the European conference, simply because it’s still a different scale, and you can find something useful for yourself. Especially if you need to escape from the routine, which is constantly delays, think about strategies, how to achieve your goals, how to grow, scale and catch up with European software companies.

Owners of small companies that focus on the development of their software products should first get to ISDEF. There will be a lot of cases, ideas, easily applied in practice. At the same time for very little money.