Best Musicians to Perform at IT Conferences

After months of speculation, VMware announced in June that Jon Bon Jovi would be the musical guest for VMworld 2012 in San Francisco. The Red Hot Chili Peppers will likewise hit the Bay Area for Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2012. These artists are the latest in a long line of musicians to make an appearance at an IT conference shindig. Take a trip down memory lane with CIO.com and check out our (100 percent objective) list of some of the best, and a couple of the worst, musical acts to perform for an audience of IT professionals.

If you think he’s just running through the halls of his high school and screaming at the top of his lungs, then you haven’t heard his work with the John Mayer Trio or his live blues and classic rock covers that leave female teenage fans thoroughly perplexed. That sort of repertoire makes Mayer a good fit for the demographic of the typical IT conference. Mayer even cracked a joke at the BlackBerry Worldwide Enterprise Symposium (WES) 2008 about blaming an empty inbox on BlackBerry service outages, not an actual lack of new email. Mayer stayed true to the provider, though—after the show, photographers caught him sporting the new BlackBerry Bold.

Blog: Al Sacco’s Favorite New BlackBerry Products, Services from WES 2008

Mayer wasn’t the only hit-maker at WES 2008. Hootie and the Blowfish, whose Cracked Rear View was one of the top-selling albums of the 1990s, performed at the Orlando House of Blues during the event’s AT&T VIP Bash. Hootie’s set included a version of “Losing My Religion”—an homage to its origins as an R.E.M. cover band at the University of South Carolina—along with “Time” and “Only Wanna Be With You,” two hits you still won’t admit you listened to back in the day (probably while wearing flannel). As it turns out, WES was one of the band’s final concerts; Hootie went on hiatus at the end of 2008 so frontman Darius Rucker could focus on his (rather successful) solo country career.

It’s cute that Chris Martin would play an Apple event, since his daughter is named Apple. It’s also cool that Martin would use the occasion of the September 2010 iTunes 10 and Ping launch to debut a new Coldplay song—in this case, “Wedding Bells.” That doesn’t make his music any better.