About Red Hat
Red Hat is an enterprise software company with an open source development model. Red Hat’s vision is an open hybrid cloud. Red Hat delivers against that vision with a comprehensive portfolio built on Linux that includes software, tools and services for hybrid cloud infrastructure, cloud-native application development, IT management and automation.
Use Case
Each year, Red Hat hosts an annual summit for thousands of IT professionals. Red Hat Summit is known as the premier open source technology event in the industry.
In 2020, the conference was scheduled to be held from April 27-29 in San Francisco. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Red Hat decided to rebuild its annual summit and take its global conference online.
Red Hat had worked with Notified for more than 6 years to create and execute successful webcasts and virtual events (Notified produced more than 200 Red Hat webcasts in 2019 alone).
Now, Red Hat needed Notified’s expertise and industry-leading technology to power their 2020 virtual summit and tap into their passionate community of developers, creating an engaging and memorable experience.
Approach
Despite the conference’s move to a virtual setting due to the COVID-19 pandemic, attendance was not inhibited. In fact, it was bolstered. Red Hat Summit 2020 was its biggest annual conference yet, with more than 82,000 registrations.
For the summit content, Red Hat featured over 300 sessions with guest speakers from around the world, using a mix of live and pre-recorded video. This included keynote presentations, product announcements and educational programs for its Red Hat community.
By utilizing the customizable features of the Notified virtual event platform, the Red Hat team was able to re-envision various aspects of engagement that were originally planned for the in-person event. Red Hat’s virtual summit featured a welcome video in the event lobby, awards, badging functionality and a user-friendly design that was easy to navigate.
Based on the positive feedback from the 2020 Summit virtual experience, Red Hat is planning additional live and on-demand content to continue engaging with global audiences. Red Hat also plans to do more virtual events in the future during the time when in-person events are not possible.
Results:
- 82,009 Total summit registrants from around the world
- 56,063 Unique attendees over the two-day summit
- 321 Total unique sessions
“In our first purely online Red Hat Summit, we not only successfully transitioned our in-person experience to virtual, but also we reached a far greater audience than we ever could at the physical event. As a result, we see great value including a virtual component to every inperson event strategy moving forward.”
-Emmett Helmes Global Online Events Lead | Red Hat