We've talked in the past about admitting vendor members to our 90 Minds group - especially in light of a very successful Meeting of the Minds 2014 where we completely sold out of sponsorship (in one or two days).
Important to note: We are NOT admitting vendor members into Socialcast -- so they won't have access to your private discussions. At this time we're not planning an area for them to gather online though if we can work out a way to open a separate group where we can admit vendor members without them seeing private prior conversations I think we're open to that.
Admitting vendor members significantly defrays the cost of running an organization such as 90 Minds (we are up to over 150 members! ) as well as provides us with resources to continue to expand our member benefits and conference type events.
Running any event (MOTM had about 70 total attendees, one dinner, one boat cruise, one post even tour, social hours) is hugely expensive and time consuming. Especially when you need to organize the logistics of dinners, social events, etc. We continue to look toward the future and plan for ways to keep costs manageable for our members.
Allowing vendor members will provide an even closer sense of community between members and vendors as the ERP world continues to evolve in the direction of connected services/integrations vs new sales. We expect to sell out of vendor member opportunities and that during future MOTM the vendors would join us in not only making presentations but also attending the conference so that you have a chance to get to know them.
For now we're defining a vendor member as someone who offers Sage related products or services. That means in this initial set of opportunities we are NOT looking to admit competitors (think Netsuite, Accumatica, etc) and we are also not admitting software publishers (think Sage). That may change in the future but for right now we're focussed on the vendors who most of us work with for third party solutions or services.
Peter Wolf is working on this effort - you can direct any inquiries to him (address and phone in the PDF linked below).
The details of our vendor member offerings are all contained at the link below:
http://www.slideshare.net/WayneSchulz/90-minds-vendor-member-opportunities