This week, part of the Realtime Register team travelled to Bali, Indonesia, for ICANN87.
From Monday through Thursday, our agenda was packed with meetings, conversations and opportunities to connect with companies from across the global domain industry.
ICANN meetings naturally provide an important forum for discussing the policies and developments shaping the Domain Name System. But for us, they are equally valuable because they bring so many different parts of the industry together in one place.
Registries, registrars, resellers, technology providers and many other organisations within the ecosystem are represented. That creates an excellent opportunity to turn the relationships we maintain throughout the year into face-to-face conversations.
Some of the most valuable meetings in Bali were with companies we already work with.
Our business depends on a network of relationships across the domain industry, ranging from the registry and supplier side of our platform to the registrars and resellers using our services.
Events such as ICANN87 give us the opportunity to sit down with those partners, hear what is happening within their organisations and markets, discuss our ongoing cooperation and explore what we can do together next.
Not every good conversation needs an immediate outcome. Building strong partnerships over the long term is just as important.
ICANN87 was also an opportunity to look beyond our existing network.
Throughout our days in Bali, we met new people and organisations, explored potential partnerships and discussed opportunities for companies to work with Realtime Register.
That’s particularly interesting given our position within different parts of the domain ecosystem.
As an ICANN-accredited registrar and wholesale platform, we work with resellers and registrars looking to consolidate domains and related services. At the other end of the chain, our Registry Gateway creates opportunities to work with registry operators looking to make their TLDs available through our network.
That makes an ICANN meeting one of those relatively rare occasions where customers, suppliers, prospects and potential strategic partners can all be sitting a few tables apart.
The commercial conversations took place against the backdrop of a domain industry that continues to develop.
Among the subjects being discussed around ICANN87 were the next round of new gTLDs, DNS abuse mitigation and efforts towards a more multilingual and universally accessible Internet.
The next new gTLD round is particularly interesting from our perspective. New extensions ultimately mean new registry operators, new possibilities for registrars and resellers and, potentially, new partnerships across the industry.
Despite working in a global industry, much of our everyday interaction inevitably happens online. That’s why getting together in person still matters.
Whether it was catching up with a long-standing partner, finally meeting someone we’ve been speaking with online, being introduced to a new contact or simply having an unexpected conversation between meetings, those interactions are a major part of the value we get from attending ICANN.
And sometimes the most interesting opportunities start with exactly those informal conversations.
After four full days, we leave Bali with strengthened partnerships, plenty of new connections and more than a few conversations to continue.
A big thank you to everyone who met with our team during ICANN87, as well as to everyone involved in bringing the domain community together in Bali. We look forward to continuing the conversations.
And hopefully, we’ll see many of you again at the next one.