By Ben Price and Tom Trappler.
The UCTech Conference is coming up fast and aiming for 700 attendees – the biggest UC IT conference ever.
Our sponsors are a major reason UC can host such a fun gathering of the UC IT community. For the third year in a row, UC IT Strategic Sourcing (ITSS) has partnered with the host campus to seek sponsors from the suppliers with systemwide IT agreements.
This year, ITSS and the UCTech conference coordinators worked together to register 29 sponsors, bringing in $210K, the highest sponsorship level yet for the annual conference!
Sponsorship funding is used to bring down the cost of registration so more of you can attend from across the UC system, as well as to provide registration subsidies for UC staff in specific areas (e.g., research IT and library science for UCTech 2019). The funding supports a lot of the meals and entertainment, including the opening reception dinner.
Sponsorship opportunities were initially only offered to IT suppliers who have systemwide agreements as a perk for good UC partners. In other words, UCTech sponsorship is not just about money, it’s a recognition of a company’s willingness to invest in UC.
For example, our platinum-level sponsor, Cisco, has a formally agreed-upon strategic relationship with UC, offering benefits to UC such as the opportunity to test and provide feedback about new products (and to keep the products afterward) and advanced training for IT security professionals.
Siteimprove is another sponsor that has demonstrated real partnership with UC, making continual improvements to its website accessibility checking tool, based on ongoing feedback from UC users.
Our sponsors also invest in the conference by sending their personnel to staff booths and meet you. So please take a moment to stop by their tables and introduce yourself. They’d like to get to know you a bit, and it’s important that we show them our appreciation.
Go to the UCTech website for the list of sponsors and descriptions. See you there!
Ben Price is associate CIO, Administrative Services, at UC Santa Barbara.
Tom Trappler is associate director, IT Strategic Sourcing, UC Procurement Services, at the UC Office of the President.