There were 1,069 attendees from 33 countries at S4x24.
- 296 asset owners (more on this below)
- 296 OT security vendors (coincidence)
- 214 consultants and integrators
- 97 ICS vendors (companies that sell ICS, Emerson, Honeywell, RA, SE, Siemens, …)
- The rest are others – – government, industry org, education, press
Other numbers:
- 574 were first time S4 attendees
- 81 had attended 5 or more S4 events
- 10 had attended 10 or more S4 events
Women In ICS Security
There were 142 women at S4x24.
This is down from 217 at S4x23. We gave away 100 free tickets to women for S4x22 and S4x23 hoping this would lead to a sustainable increase in numbers. As soon as we stopped with the free tickets it dipped down from 20% women at S4x23 to 13% at S4x24. We are thinking hard about what to try for S4x25 to improve these numbers for the reasons I’ve written about before.
On the positive side 142 is not a small number. And the impressive women that attended are taking larger roles in their companies and unofficial roles in the community. We are seeing more speaking submissions from women than 13% and this gets reflected on who gets on the S4 stage.
Asset Owners
Asset owners are an important part of the mix we want at S4 to create the future of OT and ICS security. Not to the exclusion of others. A lot of the innovators and influencers are with OT security vendors, ICS vendors, consultants, national labs, .gov, and other non-asset owner organizations. Our goal for S4 is to have between 33% and 40% asset owners.
Our efforts to get more asset owners tto attend was only partially successful. Limiting the number of tickets any non-asset owner company could purchase delayed a sell out. More important was cutting sales to all but asset owners for three weeks after we sold ticket #1,000 allowed another 40 asset owners to purchase tickets.
We are seeing increased multi-year asset owner attendees, and they bring more of their colleagues every year to experience S4. The trend line for this is right, and we will look for ways to bend it for S4x25.