'Adobe Dev Summit is no marketing gimmick'

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

Speaking to CIOL on the sidelines of Adobe Dev Summit'09 in Bangalore, Harish Sivaramakrishnan, platform evangelist of Adobe said, “A lot of developers perceive that these summits are supposed 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 through a blog posting (http://weblog.mrinalwadhwa.com/2009/07/19/disappointed/) by Mrinal Wadhwa, a Bangalore-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 doesn’t 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 don’t include community.”

Mrinal's blog indicated that non-participation of Adobe's 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 a 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 to the 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 Mrinal Wadhwa posted his grievance against the company's Evangelists 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 Bangalore-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 a thousand, 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 same city and around the same time of the year, which is in the month of July-August.