7-minute read - by Kate Brunton, June 18, 2020
When COVID-19 threatened to shut down our annual Technology Conference, we took the event online. More than 16,000 attendees from 38 different countries joined the world’s largest fully virtual developer conference, hosted by ASML.
ASML’s executive vice president of Development & Engineering Herman Boom adjusts his microphone and takes a deep breath, waiting for his cue to begin speaking to an invisible live audience of thousands. The backdrop behind him looks more like a movie set than a developer conference: with a green screen and cameras on sliders, one would half expect to see a clapperboard appear before the camera lens. But there are no ‘second takes’ in this two-day live production.
We normally host our annual Technology Conference in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands, and in hubs in San Diego, Silicon Valley and Wilton, Connecticut, with over 7,000 people attending. This year, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the entire event became one global virtual experience.
On the screens of thousands of attendees, the background behind Herman morphs into images of locations around the world. “Instead of you coming to the Technology Conference, we are coming to you,” he says. “We are all united in the same conference, while being in different places.”
With more than 16,000 employees and R&D partners tuning in virtually, what started out 20 years ago as a small knowledge-sharing event among engineers has now grown into the largest developer event worldwide. Anouk Donker, global channel manager and one of the moderators for the event, describes what an unexpected opportunity moving the conference online turned out to be.
“Normally, the invitation list has to be limited, but this year, for the first time, we were able to open the event up to the whole of ASML,” she says.
