The Amazing SolidCAM World 2021 Virtual Summit

The Amazing SolidCAM World 2021 Virtual Summit

Every year SolidCAM used to have a SolidCAM World event in a different world location, to which many of our worldwide SolidCAM Staff, Branches, Affiliates and Resellers staff are invited. The average attendance was about 250. The last 2 such events were held in Tuttlingen, Germany in 2018 and in Orlando, Florida in 2019.

The year 2020 was the year of the Pandemic and the planned event at Istanbul, Turkey had to be cancelled. Then came 2021, when the Pandemic situation was starting to improve, but still not good enough for a physical worldwide event.

I was travelling in the car with Linda Somekh, my wife and Executive VP at SolidCAM, and we were discussing what can we can actually do to convey to all our worldwide SolidCAM staff, resellers, customers and prospects, the amazing advantages of our great latest release SolidCAM 2021. Linda suggested a Virtual Summit event. I was hesitant at the start, since we had no previous experience in such a type of event. But Linda immediately reminded me that we had just watched in Feb 2021, the virtual Dassault 3D Experience event and it was impressive and very well done. This got me thinking and I said: if Dassault did it, then we must do it!

It was a completely new ball game for us, but we found the best partner, Sun Videos, that specialized in Virtual green wall events. They suggested a nice design for the Virtual theater, and we went for it.

In our previous physical worldwide events, we could invite only a limited number of staff and resellers – in the new virtual event format, there were no limits, and we decided to invite everybody in our CRM; in addition to our usual own and resellers staff, we invited all our 20,000 worldwide Industrial customers and our 50,000 prospects. So having such a huge potential number of attendees, we had to prepare very appealing and informative presentations, given by our main managers and staff, in both the technical and sales domains.

The emcees of the 2-day Virtual Summit, were Linda Somekh and Natalie Somekh, SolidCAM VP Sales. They added a lot of enthusiasm and interest, in their various connecting interludes between presentations.

I presented the main starting lecture at the 1st day, that summarized the power of SolidCAM2021 version and the complete SolidCAM Strategy for 2021. I discussed our SolidWorks integration, our main branches, affiliates and resellers worldwide, our iMachining 2D/3D revolutionary technology, our New Tool table, Turbo HSM, Sim5X, Mill-turn and Swiss solutions. I also gave a sneak peek of our main planned projects for SolidCAM2022. It was an hour-long presentation, and I was satisfied that I could explain all what I wanted to convey to our staff, reseller staff, customers and prospects.

For the 2 Summit days, we had continuous marketing, sales and technical presentations, by our worldwide managers and staff. Around 3,000 online attendees watched the event. It was an amazing success for us, especially since all presentations were recorded, posted in YouTube, our Website and our Forum, for all our staff, customers and prospects to watch later, in better suitable time.

As a final note, we believe that this type of Virtual Online events will mostly replace the previous physical events, for a long time to come.