Unisfair Sees Growth For Smaller Events and Training

Unisfair's core business is in large virtual events. The company provides a platform for hosting virtual conferences quickly and simply in general-purpose environments. It's seeing an uptake, though, in the use of Unisfair's Virtual Events Center to create adapted, branded spaces and host smaller meetings as well. Right now those events account for only 5-10% of Unisfair's business, says VP of Marketing Brent Arslaner. He suspects it may grow to as much as 30% over 2009, though.

"With the economy there’s a shift where companies had looked at us and just wanted to do business for these really large events or trade shows, but we’re seeing a growing demand for smaller scale virtual meetings," said Arslaner. "That could be for internal meetings and collaboration to sales training to executive seminars. Companies are saying, 'Instead of doing a five-day conference or 30-city roadshow, we’re going to do 3-days or 15 cities and want the balance to be virtual.'"

12 to 15 companies are using Virtual Events Center for a variety of purposes already, ranging from onboarding in HR to recruiting internationally in virtual job fairs to collaborating across global offices, but Arslaner said Unisfair is aiming for a larger, official launch in Q1 to push the new capabilities.

He compares the old environment to a traditional convention center, where the infrastructure remains the same, but dressing is added and pieces are moved around for each event. Companies are now looking to re-skin the environment, themeing them to their purposes as hospitals or offices for use in training or meetings.

Overall, the trend is towards persistence, says Arslaner. Companies are less frequently setting up for standalone large events. Now they're moving towards a series of events, meetings, and sessions after acclimating to the environment. 

"The concept around virtual events is fundamentally changing our business model in a good way. You can have your events center and do whatever you like. You have your big event and then maybe 20 medium events and then maybe hundreds of little events to get people together," said Arslaner.  "I think collaboration of any size is kind of where our model is going. At the end of the day, you just don’t do that many enormous, multi-thousand-person events per year. So we need to provide the technology to do the small events or just group meetings within the branded space.

Unisfair has integrated with WebEx and other productivity and collaboration tools to make it more suitable for the sort of collaboration that takes place outside of large networking events. With a weather eye on the economy, a hatchet to travel budgets, and at least a nod towards going green, many companies are exploring virtual events. Others, like Forterra, which recently completed a case study on collaboration, and IBM, which is integrating SameTime with virtual environments, are trying to fill that need as well. 

Unisfair says it isn't trying to compete and become the next major content management platform--and that it's still focusing on large events as a core business--but that the increased need is appealing. 

"There’s a part of our client base that, even disregarding our economy, was already moving that way, but the economy has accelerated it. It just makes sense for some clients on how they want their ecosystem to go--instead of doing these one-off events, they collaborate throughout the year," said Arslaner.  "We’re seeing these large, globally decentralized companies having a really hard time keeping everyone on the same page. It’s really hard if you’re a multi-billion dollar company with offices around the world to stay in touch. They’re looking for what really are the right set of tools to facilitate that."