No Marketing Gimmick

Responding back to the concerns raised by a community of developers in
Bengaluru, Platform Evangelist of Adobe India has conveyed that Adobe developer
summits are not a marketing gimmick, but a platform to talk about technology.

On the sidelines of Adobe Dev Summit 09 in Bengaluru, Harish
Sivaramakrishnan, Platform Evangelist of Adobe said, A lot of developers
perceive that these summits are for sales and marketing purpose only, and get
puzzled at the fact that evangelist market the technology and not the product.

The concerns were raised over a blog posting (http://weblog.mrinalwadhwa.com/2009/07/19/disappointed/)
by Mrinal Wadhwa, a Bengaluru-based rich application consultant and a prominent
member of Adobe Flex group.

The posting said, I attended MAX in Chicago and there as well I saw special
focus on community and user groups. If Dev Summit is the main event in India,
why doesnt that include community in any form? While Adobe India events
continue to be boring marketing gimmicks (there I said it). Primarily I feel
because they dont include community.

Wadhwas blog indicated that non-participation of Adobes representatives,
especially the evangelists in the user groups of Adobe products like Flex, were
sending the signal to the developer community that the evangelist were not
interested in the Indian scenario. The posting mentioned Adobe India members are
not active on flex-India or any user group mailing list.

They just use flex-India as an advertisement medium. Local Indian Flex team
members do not contribute to any local mailing lists, while I constantly see
them active on international forums like flexcoders and flex sdk list.

In reply to this allegation, Sivaramakrishnan explained, Our role is to
inform our developer community about the latest technology and products in our
offering, irrespective of the sales figures. They need to understand that we are
equally passionate about the products and technology as them.

He elaborated, There are two reasons for their disappointment. The
presentations and the topics for the summits are chosen after determining the
quality of the majority of the attendees, which would not be new for the entire
lot. And secondly, summits are perceived as training sessions, which is not
true. A training camp is only about educating, while a summit is about knowledge
sharing. But in order to address a larger group, we have to overlook the
requests of the smaller group for the time being.

Sivaramakrishnan added that Adobe evangelists are in constant communication
with the developers through user groups, mailing lists, and social networking.
They even organize boot camps, summits, and events.

The entire debate sparked off when Wadhwa posted his grievance against the
companys Evangelist and their lack of participation in the community activities
in his blog. The blog received supportive responses from the community through
comments and further blog postings. A Bengaluru based developer working for a US
firm, who had also attended the Dev Summit 09, on condition of anonymity said,
I have to agree with the accusation. I have been attending many developer
summit in the city conducted by other developer companies. They present a lot of
case studies about community innovation and not just the product presentations
in rows.

He feels that other summits are more communicative than that of Adobe. They
showcase various innovations done by members of developer community. This also
encourages him in doing some innovation with the product. However, all these
debates did not stop the developers from attending the summit. According to
Shivramkrishnan, the total footfall was more than 1,000, while last year it was
around 500.

Looking forward, the company is planning to organize the Dev Summit 2010 in a
larger scale, perhaps in the same city and around the same time of the year, in
the month of July-August.

Akanksha Prasad/CIOL

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