This portion of the speaker guide is for the field marketing team or the person or team that is creating the slides.
Please coordinate within your company who will be speaking at each event, and provide STAC with the speaker details. Click here to submit the speaker details by the dates listed on your checklist.
ACTION: Submit your presentation here by the following deadlines:
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Innovation Roundup and Tech Talk final presentation slides |
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Tech Talk Draft Presentation Slides |
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Sydney: Thursday, September 4, 2025, 10PM AEST |
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Sydney: Thursday, August 28, 2025, 10PM AEST |
Presentation Guidelines
Late submissions may be disqualified, in which case, we’ll display your firm’s logo while the speaker speaks from notes. STAC will review presentations for compliance, request revisions if needed, and upload them to the presentation machines.
Presentation Setup
- Slides are driven by an AV technician who will display slides when each speaker arrives on stage.
- Speakers will be provided with a wireless presentation remote (aka “clicker”) at the podium to drive the slides once displayed.
- Presentation will be visible on the confidence monitor in front of the speaker.
- Speaker notes on slides will not be visible. If your speaker has not rehearsed the presentation without notes, please provide them with printable notes which they can bring to the podium.
Slide Preparation
- Submit slides in PowerPoint or PDF format (16:9 aspect ratio)
- DO NOT use the following—we cannot guarantee the features will work in the presentation environment:
- embedded media
- Internet links
- slide timings
- bright colors (especially yellow)
- other complex PowerPoint features
Best practice: Keep slides simple—use images and large text where possible.
Additional Details:
- If the slides will be used for multiple cities, notify STAC when submitting
- If submitted via PowerPoint and speaker/city details need to be updated, we can modify so you don’t need to resubmit.
- STAC distributes a PDF version to our global membership post-event. Avoid overlays and build effects that don’t convert well.
- You may provide an alternative PDF version if you would like.
- Consider a link to a white paper and contact details on the final slide of your presentation, for post-event engagement. This may also take some pressure off on time constraints.
Submitting Slides
Thank you for your commitment to high-quality, error-free presentations. At STAC, we work hard to meet the rigorous standards expected by our sponsors and attendees, and adherence to these guidelines is essential.
To maintain these high standards, slides must be submitted by the event deadline (see above). Multiple submissions create delays and disrupt preparation. Only one revision is permitted, which must be submitted no later than 48 hours before the event. No changes can be made after this deadline as slides are preloaded onto the presentation machines.
Presentation Rules
Users and vendors value STAC Summits because they have a high substance-to-hype ratio (as well as high substance-to-FUD). To maintain those ratios, we have a few simple rules. Failure to abide by these rules may disqualify your firm from presenting at future Summits.
Because there is very little time to make revisions after slides are submitted, we reserve the right to modify or remove slides that do not adhere to these rules. We encourage you to contact us if you need help interpreting these rules for your case.
- No slamming other products. Fact-based claims of superiority versus the competitive field are OK but must not be directed at a particular vendor. Note that a negative about a competitive product can almost always be rephrased as a positive about your own product.
- How to use benchmarks:
- It's OK to use STAC Benchmark results to make a comparison, if the report with the results is published and publicly accessible, you clearly identify what was tested, and you quote the SUT ID and Spec ID for each result (legible footnotes are fine).
- If testing was just completed and a report could not be published in time for the event, STAC will present the results in our segment. You can refer the audience back to the results in our presentation but may not present the results in your presentation.
- Even if using STAC Benchmarks, a comparison should NOT be directed at a single named vendor. There’s too much room to tell only part of the story about the results or the systems tested. The exception is a comparison that appears as part of the Summary section of an audited STAC Report, provided the comparison is cited with the full context included in the Summary.
- Non-STAC benchmark results must be clearly labeled “NOT STAC BENCHMARKS,” may not be compared to STAC Benchmarks, and may not be the basis for competitive comparisons, since the quality of non-STAC Benchmark results is open to question. If they are not labeled, we will do so in the final slides. Also bear in mind that if you present non-STAC Benchmarks for workloads that are covered by STAC Benchmarks, the audience will wonder why.