May AirWaves Key Takeaways  

A big thank you to everyone who joined us for our May AirWaves. We have enjoyed bringing you AirWaves and having the chance to connect with our customers, answer questions and provide these updates. Moving forward, AirWaves will take place every second month, streaming in three sessions across APAC, EMEA and North America.

Company update – Chris Ridd

Consolidating Payment Gateways 

Now, more than ever, security is one of our priorities, and we’re dedicated to providing a safe and secure environment to power your events.  This commitment includes offering e-commerce gateway integrations that are less susceptible to card washing/BIN attacks. Although such attacks don’t directly compromise you or your attendee’s payment details, they can cause major disruptions to your day-to-day operations. 

With this in mind, we will be moving away from all 2-tier e-commerce gateway integrations and recommending a consolidated list of 3-tier payment gateways.  This way we can reduce the paradox of choice, streamlining our offerings and providing gateways that you can use with confidence.

Additionally, after receiving customer feedback we’ve made the decision to build and offer a payment gateway of our own, we will be working on this in the coming months.  

MEA State Awards

Last week we attended the Meetings and Events Australia State Awards night for Queensland and were honoured to receive the Event Technology Award. We were also thrilled to see our customers taking home awards:

• Corporate Event of the Year: Jess Glass, Senior Marketing Officer – Events, University of Queensland

• Event Manager of the Year – PCO Award: Susan Harris, Director Absolute Events and Marketing

News and Events Evolve 2023 and MeetingsNZ 

We are thrilled to be attending MEA’s Evolve 2023 and BEIA’s MEETINGS 2023 conferences in June as the official technology provider. Our team will be taking the floor to connect with those in attendance and look forward to showcasing our technology. Make sure you stop by the stand if you’re attending!

Save the date – AirTime 

We are excited to announce the new name for our user conference: AirTime 2023 – Make every moment count. This year we are elevating our conference, with new venues, a new format and now open to both customers and our broader community.

The official dates for the conference are locked in and we encourage you to mark them in your calendar, as this event is not to be missed.

Product and Technology Update – Mehdi Khalili 

We’re thrilled to announce our plans for an architectural uplift in collaboration with Microsoft and a Microsoft Gold Partner. This shift is designed to improve performance, reliability, and the overall user experience across our platform.

We are transitioning to a multi-tenanted architecture hosted on Azure App Services. This architecture will employ a zero-downtime deployment model, eliminating the need for version pinning and ensuring uninterrupted service, even during upgrades. Importantly, this is not simply a lift and shift from our existing setup. We’re implementing fundamental changes and are confident that these improvements will enhance performance and reliability, effectively meeting the evolving needs of our growing customer base.

Latest tips and resources – Renee Elliott 

Fast Track Updates 

Our education team have made improvements to our Fast Track training course to create a more streamlined learning experience. You will now be able to advance through your modules more efficiently with condensed content meaning less pages per topic.

You can also jump straight into our Advanced courses without completing Stage 1 topics. This allows your team to easily navigate straight to the advanced topics you need.

Head of Product Interview – James Flynn and Chris Ridd 

A month into his new role, we had the chance to get to know more about our new Head of Product, James Flynn. With the addition of this role, James is looking to embrace deep user insights to assist in developing the product roadmap. Building this coherent product strategy will allow our customers to have full visibility on where we are going and how we will continue to address your needs.

You can view the interview between James and Chris below:

What’s next? 

As mentioned, we will be switching the AirWaves format to bi-monthly with our next Webinar taking place in July. Be sure to keep an eye on your inbox out for your invitation.