It’s official — INFOCUS Conference 2023 was one for the books!
As PCI Energy Solutions’ brand marketing manager, I had the honor of attending my first INFOCUS conference, and I have to say, it was everything I had hoped for and more. From meeting clients face to face to seeing our newly rebranded marketing and promotional materials in action, the entire experience was fun and incredibly enlightening. And now that it’s over, I can’t wait to do it all again next year.
But before planning our next big energy conference, I wanted to share some takeaways and a full photo gallery of photos in this end-of-conference wrap-up.
The energy transition and the need for continuous software delivery
Just two days after settling back in after INFOCUS 2023, our president and COO, Javier Martin, reflected on the conference in a blog post centered around the energy transition. He drove home how important it is to have software solutions to manage the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. We know that transition can be challenging, so at this year’s conference, we showcased how our upgraded software solutions can help you navigate your own energy transition.
We showed new applications demonstrating how our software solutions can help you tackle various challenges in your journey, like battery optimization, integrating wind and solar assets, creating hydrogen hubs, trading natural gas, and managing distributed energy resources (DERs). We hope that, after attending this year’s energy conference, you have confidence that you can master the energy transition and continue making the shift to renewable energy sources.
How we’ll make INFOCUS Conference 2024 even better
It’s standard at PCI to “retro” our campaigns, projects, and even this conference. That means we apply a critical eye to what we did and how it went and talk about what we learned from it. We then use those learnings to make next year’s event even better.
So, what did we learn, and how will it change INFOCUS 2024?
We walked away with so many insights and boiled them down to 24 commitments to improve next year’s event. Below are a few I think you’ll be especially excited about — and now that they’re public commitments, you get to hold us to our word!
- We’ll survey customers before the conference and involve you in content planning. Our customers already steer the ship when it comes to the presentations at this user conference; now it’s time you played an even more impactful role in planning what that content should be.
- We’ll work to make our content more interactive, actionable, relevant, and advanced. We want you to feel inspired at INFOCUS 2024 and walk away with insights you can implement immediately and feel like you’ve learned something you couldn’t have learned anywhere else.
- And because our pre-conference headquarters tour was such a hit, we’ll aim for another pre-event activity next year too.
We truly value your feedback
I spent a few hours in a hotel suite with our local video team recording six client testimonials and footage for a new INFOCUS promo reel. During that time, I got the chance to ask our clients what value they get from INFOCUS. Essentially, what keeps you coming back year after year? And that funny thing happened where you hear the same thing so many times that you think, “Gosh, well, that must be true!”
Consistently, I heard that our customers prized the in-person connections they made with folks just like them — people who held similar positions at other organizations but were located hundreds or thousands of miles from them, people they don’t have the chance to interact with outside of this annual conference. INFOCUS allows them to find a sounding board in their peers, identify common issues, and put their heads together to workshop solutions.
They also love the accessibility of PCI experts. We hope you know we’re always there when you need us (often taking your 3 a.m. phone call when you’re faced with a critical issue), but at INFOCUS, you can put faces to names and solidify those relationships that often take place strictly over chat or Zoom calls.
I also heard from one first-time attendee that he was ready to use what he learned at the conference to improve his organization. “It’s a lot of good, tangible information we can take back and improve how we do our processes and how we have our PCI software configured,” he told me.
Norman headquarters tour recap
We worked over the past few months to realize our new brand in our Norman office and spruce things up a bit!
— PCI Energy Solutions (@pci_energy) May 2, 2023
This is our “customer success wall” that depicts all our customers and their generation capacity we’ve supported over the past 30 years. pic.twitter.com/ovxZqm3AON
Another aspect that made this year’s conference so special was offering a headquarters tour to our clients. We escorted nearly 50 customers through our office on the University of Oklahoma Research Campus in Norman, Oklahoma, and got to talk about all the updates we’ve tackled since our rebrand in September 2022.
With a new mission, articulated values with visual representations, a drastically different color palette, and a team of employees fit for participation on any HGTV show you could throw at them, we put our heads together to figure out how to realize our new brand in this space and generally spruce things up a bit.
What resulted were updated furniture and décor, plants (live ones!), an entire wall displaying our new mission, a wall emblazoned with our values, and a “customer success wall” that depicts all our customers and their generation capacity we’ve supported over the past 30 years. We even renamed conference rooms to honor the space we inhabit between software and energy, so now you can hold a meeting in the Megawatt Room, while Marketing finds its home in the Green Room and our SPP Team in the Cloud Room.
As someone who co-led one of the tours, I can say our clients were so engaged and interested in how and where we work. They truly were excited to meet us and have in-person conversations with people they usually only see through a screen.
Can you find yourself in this INFOCUS Conference 2023 photo gallery?
Not only did our local video team work with us to record our customers’ experiences using our products and their takes on INFOCUS, but they photographed several memorable moments from the conference and delivered dozens of high-quality images that captured the color and excitement around the event.
I hope you enjoy flipping through these photos and reliving the event (or possibly seeing it come to life for the first time).
If you did attend this year, I want to extend a sincere thanks on behalf of PCI and relay an invitation to see you again at INFOCUS 2024 next spring.
Stay tuned for updates on INFOCUS Conference 2024! Follow us on LinkedIn and subscribe to our Energy Essentials newsletter to be the first to know about the latest news and updates.
