With safety and travel regulations unpredictable and travel-bans still largely in place amongst many of the major data center operators and technology vendors, DCD has decided to delay the return of physical events in the US to 2022. Virtual conference programs will run on the same dates as previously planned.

“Deciding now to keep the US event series virtual-only for 2021, gives us even more time to focus on the high quality programming we’ve been delivering since lock-down began, and gives certainty to our event partners and delegates,” says George Rockett, co-founder & CEO of DCD.

“We’ll be concentrating on continued growth of our digital marketing platform that is regularly connecting more than 300,000 subscribers across the global data center ecosystem with the latest news and technology insights at a time of unprecedented industry growth.”

DCD>New York will return to a physical event format on April 5th, 2022 at its long term home, the Marriott Marquis New York. Dates for DCD>San Francisco and DCD>Virginia are set to be announced shortly.

Since March 2020, DCD has successfully produced 25 virtual conferences attracting more than 115,000 session viewers (both live and on-demand), evolving a dynamic audience experience that includes keynotes, panels and fireside chats that lead into roundtables, think tanks and 1-2-1 networking on the new DCD>Connect platform.

“We’ve received so many positive comments from delegates on how effective our virtual conferences have been in providing market insight,” says Rebecca Davison, head of conference production at DCD. “But people are really missing face-to-face networking. I’m working on how we can bring the best of both worlds together and what hybrid events need to look like. DCD>London will be the test-bed for this in November.”

B2B digital consumption trends are changing

“Over the past year we have seen growth in web-traffic of more than 40 percent to 5m visits,” says Dan Loosemore, chief marketing officer at DCD, highlighting that the pandemic has reinforced pre-existing trends in content consumption and B2B decision-making.

“Recent research suggests that 67 percent of technology discovery is now done digitally, with 90 percent of B2B buyers stating that online content has a major impact on purchasing decisions. Just as we have seen the rise of hybrid infrastructure in the data center industry, a hybrid and multichannel approach to decision-making is the new normal," continued Loosemore.

DCD's mission is to empower the people who plan, build, operate and supply digital infrastructure to make better decisions in a fast moving and complex environment.

View the 2021 DCD conference and event schedule here.