Attendance Up At Kofax Transform

By Mark Brousseau

At a time when reduced travel budgets are negatively impacting many conferences and other industry events, attendance at Transform 2009, the Kofax Annual Conference, scheduled for October 21-22 at the Manchester Grand Hyatt, in San Diego, is up about 30 percent compared to 2008, Alan Kerr the company’s executive vice president of field operations said during a session to kick-off the event.

With a theme of “The Need for Speed,” this year’s Transform event opened with a video montage blending the Kofax value proposition, heart-thumping music, and images of race cars, military jet planes and race horses.

Kerr told attendees that this year’s Transform event for the Americas attracted 425 attendees; 278 of the delegates represent Kofax business partners and 147 are from end-user organizations. “Unlike previous Transform events, this year’s conference is both an end user and partner event. In previous years, we were focused primarily on partners,” Andrew Pery, chief marketing officer at Kofax said during a press briefing last night. “We now have a good balance between partners and users.”

To ensure the event appealed to both partners and users, Pery said Kofax worked hard to develop an agenda that includes a broad range of product and industry sessions, as well as certification classes by AIIM and IOMA. “We’re trying to deliver value beyond product information,” Pery explained.

Some 392 attendees at this year’s Transform event are from the United States, 12 are from Canada, two are from Mexico and two are from South America, Kerr said. Approximately 20 of the users come from the user base of 170 Systems, which Kofax recently acquired. The event also has guests from Indonesia, India, New Zealand, Singapore and South Africa. Kofax will host a Transform event in Berlin, Germany, October 26-27 for partners and users from Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Attendance at that event also is expected to be up, Pery said.

Transform sponsors include Fujitsu (the Platinum sponsor for the event), Canon, Bowe Bell+Howell, HP, Epson America, OPEX Corporation, A2iA, Computing System Innovations (CSI), FileBound, Ricoh, ibml, Therefore, AdvancedCaptureTeam, and Panasonic.