The ISDEF’2009 8th Annual International Conference has ended in Moscow. It was hosted by Izmaylovo Alpha Hotel and drew over 250 participants.

The conference was dominated by issues of the operation and development of companies in the off-the-shelf software market amid the crisis.

This market segment still attracts a great deal of interest as evidenced by active support of the conference from IT vendors, law firms, and investment funds. The conference was sponsored by Softkey, Digital River, Webmoney, Microsoft, Intel, NVIDIA, Cleverbridge, Yandex, femida.US, Nokia, PayProGlobal, asknet.de, NBAC, Adobe Systems, Avangate, ABRT, and Softpressrelease. The plenary session was attended by Dmitry Severov, Deputy Minister of Telecom and Mass Communications, who spoke of programs to support developers and cooperation between the government and the IT business community.

Marketing is traditionally one of the core subjects of all ISDEF conferences. This time all reports focused on optimizing operations in the current economic conditions and achieving maximum performance at minimum expense.

The section titled Developer Support Programs also had an extensive agenda. Microsoft announced a new partner program for developers. A Nokia representative presented a report on creating mobile software using the company’s tools. Computations using graphic processor units were the subject of a report by NVIDIA. Allsoft’s experts gave a presentation on the Russian specifics of collaboration between developers and vendors. The highly popular subject of cloud technologies was touched upon by a representative of Parallels. Intel offered a brief overview of the latest software tools for developers.

It was important for conference participants to understand what path to follow upon growing to a certain point. The Business Growth section offered some insights in reports devoted to combining different business models (product and service), product localization, vendor relations, and promotion on the US market.

The legal section was traditionally popular: protecting intellectual property at minimum expense. Intellectual property amid the crisis: the ABC of survival, tax aspects of the business of software companies.

For the second year running, the investment section was divided into theoretical and practical parts. The first part included traditional reports, while the second one involved project presentations to investors. The results of the second part will become known only after some time when both the project owner and the investor are ready to discuss it.

ISDEF is very young in many respects, which is why the jocoserious session on how it feels for ladies to work in the software market proved highly informal yet very useful for all participants. How does one work with a woman who manages a company or department? How does a woman build relations with men who are her subordinates? It is through an informal discussion of such issues that one can achieve maximum results and… give the company a second wind.

More conference details are available on the ISDEF site: www.isdef.org.