A little over a month ago, I posted a blog stating my opinion that the choice to host the SHRM conference in New Orleans stunk. With that blog, I tried unsuccessfully to make a literary pun about the heat and humidity in the Big Easy. I went too far when I also made numerous comments about the city’s crime problems. As you might imagine, this was not the most popular blog I have ever written. I ended up changing the blog after a number of people bashed me over the post. A friend of mine was convinced I was going to get arrested as soon as I drove into town. Another was convinced SHRM was going to bar me from the show. Neither happened but I was looking over my shoulder for the first day.
After going to the show and spending some time walking the streets of New Orleans, I must now admit that I was wrong. The heat was less than I expected and the afternoon showers really seemed to cool things down. As for the crime, the city police had added some type of cherry picker things with blackened windows which I am certain were manned by the city’s finest. I saw one of these on Canal Street near my hotel and another on Bourbon Street. It’s unfortunate that the city had to add these in such heavily traveled areas to control the crime but it sure made me feel safer.
As for the show, I only go to these shows to chat with our existing and prospective HRIS and Payroll software vendors so I can only address my observations regarding the expo hall. There were an awful lot of vendors at the show but I was told attendance was down considerably from 2008. Someone said the 2008 attendance was at 15k and the 2009 attendance was down to 10K. I did notice that many of the HR technology vendors did not spend nearly as much as they spent at the HR Tech show. Taleo had a much smaller booth, Sage Abra had far fewer representatives in attendance, and Workday was not in attendance at all. People Soft, Oracle and SAP were not there either.
I spoke with representatives from Kronos, ADP, Humanic Design, High Line, and Paychex about adding their products to our site. Between now and year end I am confident that we will see most, if not all, of these vendors added to CompareHRIS.com. I also got a chance to meet with a number of our existing HRIS vendors. For those vendors who were not at the show (Workday), I will be chasing them to Chicago at the HR Tech Show.
What about Claydough?
I must reluctantly report that no one but vendors, who were excluded, won any of the money I had in my pocket ready to hand out. We issued a press release saying that for the first five people to say “Hi, Clay”, we would hand them $100. We also mentioned the contest in our blog and in our newsletters. I had no intention of selling anyone anything. I just wanted to talk face to face with users of CompareHRIS.com and readers of our blog. Oh well, some ideas are good and some are bad. This one did not work out as planned.
